Report: Census Undercounts Revealed – Primarily in Red States

A new report from the Heritage Foundation brings to light undercounts from the 2020 Census and how they may have contributed to erroneously allocated congressional seats — particularly in swing and conservative states.

The research was authored by Hans von Spakovsky, a Senior Legal Fellow at Heritage and Manager of the organization’s Election Law Reform Initiative.

His report dissects data provided by the Census Bureau itself, in both their initial 2020 report and in the subsequent recount, the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, or PES — which shows that the initial count was incorrect in at least 14 states, or in over a quarter (28%) of states in the country.

A key finding of the report:

“Errors in the 2020 Census count may have cost certain states congressional representation, electors, and federal government funding during the next decade.”

Further along, Spakonsky writes the following:

…as a result of these errors, Florida did not receive two additional congressional seats and Texas did not receive one more congressional seat. Meanwhile, two other states, Minnesota and Rhode Island, each retained a congressional seat that they should have lost, and Colorado gained a new seat to which it was rightfully not entitled.The harms flowing from these mistakes impact more than just congressional representation, which also affects the number of electors from those states since they are calculated by the number of Senators and Representatives in each state. Because the Treasury and other federal departments will continue to use the original, official Census numbers (and not the new numbers contained in the PES), these errors will affect $1.5 trillion in funding received by states in federal appropriations during the next decade in disbursements that are distributed based on the population of each state.

Following the latest results from the Post-Enumeration Survey, Census Bureau Director Robert Santos cautioned that “No census is perfect” and “PES allows us to become more informed about the 2020 census by estimating what portion of the population was correctly counted, where we missed people and where some people were counted that shouldn’t have been.”

READ NEXT: DC Can’t Handle Few Thousand Illegal Migrants Bused From TX and AZ – Calls for National Guard >>