Restoring the U.S. Census

In 1790, the first United States census was a straightforward affair. Marshals rode on horseback, counted people where they lived, and returned with ledgers that would determine representation in Congress. The idea was as simple as it was profound: political power should follow the actual number of people—not estimates, not probabilities, not manipulated figures—residing in each state. This “actual Enumeration,” written into Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, was meant to be one of the republic’s great safeguards of equal representation.

Two hundred thirty years later, the Census Bureau turned that safeguard upside down and thwarted the will of voters. In 2020, it implemented “differential privacy,” an opaque algorithm that deliberately injects false numbers into small-area data. Supposedly designed to protect privacy and identities, it instead scrambled population counts in ways that Harvard researchers found made it “impossible to follow the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote.’”

At the same time, the incoming Biden Administration dismantled the Administrative Records Project, the Trump-era initiative that would have allowed the bureau to use existing federal data to determine citizenship and correct census errors. The result was a census that was riddled with miscounts, opaque to challenge, and constitutionally suspect.

The decision to implement differential privacy was made at the precise moment it became clear that President Trump intended to exclude illegal aliens from apportionment counts in the 2020 census. By scrambling block-level data and erasing the probability of independent verification, the permanent bureaucracy insulated itself from oversight and judicial review. This was the administrative state’s “insurance policy”—to create an algorithm that would outlast any presidential term and ensure that apportionment would inflate blue states. Citizenship status was also buried under layers of statistical noise.

In 2022, the bureau admitted that the 2020 census had overcounted populations in eight states—including Minnesota and Rhode Island—and undercounted in six, including Texas and Florida. These shifts cost Florida two seats it should have gained, deprived Texas of one, and allowed Minnesota and Rhode Island to keep seats they should have lost. The error rate was orders of magnitude higher than the 2010 census, and just so happened to tilt the political map toward Democratic-leaning states.

This was compounded by the fact that illegal aliens were counted in the apportionment totals. The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. New York sidestepped the constitutional question of whether illegals must be counted, holding only that the Trump Administration’s method was not yet ripe for review. In plain terms, the Court left the door open for an administration down the road to exclude illegals, but made clear that any such attempt must be grounded in real, person-by-person data, not estimates.

The bureau’s defense of its 2020 process—that it was fit for the purposes of apportionment and redistricting—strains credulity. Differential privacy’s own architects admit it prevents anyone outside the bureau from determining whether errors in local counts are actual mistakes or deliberate algorithmic noise. That makes useless the long-standing Count Question Resolution Program, the means by which states and localities can verify or challenge the Census Bureau’s numbers. Jurisdictions can no longer even tell whether their data is wrong, much less correct it.

The legal case for correction is strong. In cases such as Carey v. Klutznick, federal courts have recognized that when census methodology produces systemic inaccuracies that undermine the “actual Enumeration” requirement, equitable relief is appropriate. The Constitution sets a floor—at least one enumeration every ten years—but no ceiling. Nothing prohibits a supplemental, corrected count when the original is fundamentally flawed. Nor does 13 U.S.C. § 141, which outlines the census, bar a republication. It prescribes the decennial process but cannot constitutionally forbid additional enumerations in extraordinary circumstances.

What happened in 2020 qualifies as extraordinary. The bureau not only miscounted at unprecedented levels but also adopted a methodology that guarantees that such errors cannot be corrected.

Can President Trump fix this problem? Yes—but only if he acts with legal precision and political resolve. The Constitution’s Census Clause is not a one-shot-per-decade rule—it is an ongoing mandate to ensure an accurate count. The Secretary of Commerce, acting under presidential direction, has broad discretion over census operations, so long as the process meets constitutional standards. Courts have already held that census decisions are reviewable under the Administrative Procedure Act and that systemic flaws may justify relief before the next decennial count.

Crucially, the Supreme Court in Trump v. New York signaled that a future administration could attempt to exclude illegal aliens if it built a transparent, data-driven record showing how it could be done without relying on estimates or sampling. By publishing a corrected enumeration now—without the algorithmic distortions of differential privacy and with verified citizenship data—the president could both restore the 2020 results and force the courts to resolve this constitutional question before 2030.

The Trump Administration’s first task must be to eliminate differential privacy from all block-level data used for redistricting and publish the 2020 enumerated dataset as it existed before the algorithm was applied. Second, the Administrative Records Project needs to be reinstated and expanded in order to create a block-level citizenship database using federal, state, and local sources. Third, the Count Question Resolution process should be restored so that states and localities can verify their own data. Finally, an appropriate deadline should be set so that the corrected census can be published in time for judicial review before the next decennial count.

Critics will claim that these steps are partisan. But the principle at stake is older and deeper than party: representation must be based on a truthful count of those who actually live in each state and are part of its political community. The Founders did not fight a revolution to replace representation by consent with representation by statistical manipulation.

Restoring the census to its constitutional purpose will not be easy. It will require political will, statutory reform, and likely a trip to the Supreme Court. But the alternative is worse: a future in which the foundation of representative government rests on falsehoods, and citizens watch their political power being drained away by an unelected bureaucracy’s algorithm.

The law permits correction. The Constitution invites it. And the republic—if it is to remain one—requires it.

The post Restoring the U.S. Census appeared first on The American Mind.