On May 25, the lawsuit State of Ohio v Raimondo, s.d., 3:21cv-64, was settled. The Census Bureau now says it will provide population data for redistricting by August 16. Originally the Census had said it couldn’t furnish it until September 30. Ohio had then sued.
How many seconds on 16 Aug 2021 to have 2021-2022 new ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymander maps ???
—-
Voters vote — NOT Census pops –
esp children, legal foreign and esp illegal foreign INVADER folks.
—
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
Everyone working for the census bureau should be flogged through the streets until they do their damn job.
We need to think of new ways of doing the census. We could have a voluntary, perpetual census in which people could report their names and addresses to the census bureau in an ongoing basis. The census bureau would have a permanent staff to verify filings. Once every ten years, the active filings on-hand would be totaled for apportionment.
NOOOO apportionments and direct taxes = NOOO census needed.
Voters vote.
EQUAL Votes to elect = Total Votes / Total Members.
Legal foreigner residents have to register with USA regime.
ALL the ID / census stuff is for TOTAL 666 control.
@ Demo Rep:
No census? Apportionment by total votes cast? That’s novel. But, IMO that would only increase the appearance of fraud for many.
Maybe Representatives ought to be apportioned according to the amount of TAXES collected from each state. No need for a census then.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2021/05/27/us-census-synthetic-data-worries-researchers/7470435002/
Census Bureau’s use of ‘synthetic data’ worries researchers
—-
NOT enough 666 govt spying on ALL folks ???
They’re cooking up data?
“Synthetic data” in the Census?
Maybe my idea to use tax revenues to apportion Representatives in Congress isn’t so crazy, after all.
Art I, Sec 2, Clause 1 of the US Constituion reads, in part:
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers…”
Has there ever been a direct tax that met this requirement? Since the 16th Amendment, the “direct tax” clause has been moot.
But, maybe the Section ought to be amended to state that “Representatives…shall be apportioned among the several states…according to their respective tax revenues…”
Then there would be a direct, proportional link between taxes and representation.
Actually, it has not been moot. The part of the Constitution which prohibits a direct tax on American citizens has never been repealed. Direct taxes must be apportioned among the states.
@ Andy:
Has any such direct tax ever been levied?
@WZ,
See Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan Trust Company.
The purpose of the 16th Amendment was to circumvent the SCOTUS ruling that an income tax based on income derived from property was a direct tax. A tax on wage income was considered an excise tax. That is taxing income derived from selling your labor was not distinguishable from taxing the purchase of your corn.
@WZ,
Imagine that instead of a group of people electing each representative. You could give a proxy to your representative. Consider corporate governance. You can assign a proxy for each share you own, or you can show up at the shareholders meeting and vote for yourself.
Each citizen over the age of 18 has one share of the government. For a government we would want to restrict any representative from having too much power. For practical reasons we might wish to limit self-representation.
@JR
Proxy voting is an interesting ideas that could be tried within states.
IMO, the issue here is how to apportion Representatives in Congress among the states.
I suppose you could use Dem Rep’s principle, and apportion Representatives according to the total number of proxies in the country. But then, you have the same problem as Demo Rep of having the federal government define who qualifies as a voter or proxy.
Here’s some more about the new approach to aggregating census data at Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/27/redistricting-gerrymandering-2021-moon-duchin-interview-491199?utm_source=pocket-newtab
They call it “differential privacy”
Here’s an interesting quote from Duchin in the Politico article:
“Let me give you a quick example: Districts, on their own, are generally not very good devices for representing minorities. And there’s something ironic about that, because I take that to be one of the main arguments in favor of districts in the first place: that if you have a state and there’s a certain subpopulation that has representational needs, you can draw a district in which they have a controlling influence and can elect representatives. Today, we think about that as important, so that racial and ethnic minority groups can elect candidates of choice. But that same concept could be applied to people who prefer minority political parties and are geographically clustered enough that you can capture their preferences by drawing a district.”
I agree, but I don’t see any political will to do anything about it any time soon, if ever.
You know, one thing about drawing up “minority” districts is that you basically surrender all the other districts to a perpetual “majority”, whether that’s ethnic or political.
The problem is that, at least in most states, majorities draw up the district’s, so they like that and want to keep it that way. Especially if that’s the only way they can stay in the majority, but even in states where they have a comfortable supermajority they still want to tilt the playing field even more.
@WZ,
“differential privacy” is subject of an Alabama lawsuit regarding the census. Under PL 94-171 the Census Bureau is required to report redistricting data to the states by April 1. This is the deadline they have missed. The data includes population counts for census blocks. If the Census Bureau reveals that there are 37 persons living on your block, they have not really revealed much about you personally, even if they also provide information about age and race.
In past censuses, persons have been swapped between nearby census blocks. This does not have much effect on districting, since it does not change the district population, and it is unlikely to change racial characteristics. If you are targeting an individual block based on it having 13 black persons you are likely violating equal protection by assigning persons on the basis of race.
The Census Bureau has found that if you publish enough aggregate data in different forms, that the underlying individual data can be reconstructed. With inclusion of private-source data, individuals can be identified.
So even though you were promised privacy, and your form was not leaked or hacked, it may be possible to know what Walter Ziobro’s census form said. This is all possible because of the advent of Big Data.
The idea behind differential privacy is to obscure individual data by moving it around more extensively. But with greater privacy, there is less accuracy. We might not know how many people live on your block, and it will no longer be possible to create districts with “equal population”.
It was also found that in experimental tests that there was systemic bias against rural and minority populations. Part of the reporting delay may be due to tuning parameters.
It may be hard to bring a case based on use of differential privacy. Your interest in an accurate census is amorphous. You can’t determine if you are harmed by differential privacy because the intent is to hide whether you are placed in an overpopulated or underpopulated district. Perhaps statistics on a national basis might provide some information. But “plaintiff Walter Zebro has a 34% chance of his block being underreported, and thus underrepresented abridging his right to vote” is going to be hard for you to show standing.
“The idea behind differential privacy is to obscure individual data by moving it around more extensively. But with greater privacy, there is less accuracy. We might not know how many people live on your block, and it will no longer be possible to create districts with “equal population””
Single member districts of equal population may no longer be possible, if this is so.
@WZ,
When challenges to use of multi-member districts were made to the SCOTUS, they kept asking for a case that showed a disparate effect on racial or political minorities.
When it finally happened, it was a racial case, and the possibility of an effect on political minorities was forgotten.
Political minorities are likely to be less geographically cohesive than racial minorities so it would be more difficult to prove a disparate effect.
@WZ,
Equal population districts were always a myth, but lawyers and judges could use it as a pretext to rule how they wanted to.
Districts should be based on number of actual voters. They could be updated after every election.