# 2020 Census The twenty-fourth decennial enumeration, taken as of April 1, 2020. It was disrupted by COVID-19, compressed by a political fight over its schedule, and delivered months late. It is the first census in which the executive tried both to add a citizenship question and to remove people from the apportionment base, and the first protected by [[Differential Privacy]]. ## The count The apportionment population moved **seven House seats**. Texas gained two; Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon gained one each. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each lost one. California lost a seat for the first time in its history. The margins were extraordinarily thin. The 435th seat went to Minnesota, and New York fell **89 people** short of keeping it. The average district holds 761,169 people. ## The schedule fight - **March 18, 2020** — field operations suspended for the pandemic. In April the Bureau asked Congress for a 120-day extension of the statutory deadlines. Congress never granted it. - **August 3, 2020** — the Bureau announced that door-to-door follow-up would end on **September 30**, a month earlier than its own revised plan, so that apportionment counts could reach the President by December 31 — that is, before the change of administration. - **Ross v. National Urban League** — a district court ordered counting to continue. On October 13, 2020 the Supreme Court stayed that order, and field operations ended October 15. - **Delivery** — the apportionment counts arrived April 26, 2021, not December 31, 2020. The redistricting data arrived August 12, 2021, not April 1. Neither miss had any legal consequence ([[Census Data Products Tree]]). ## The two attempts to change who counts 1. **The citizenship question**, blocked as pretextual in [[Department of Commerce v. New York]] (June 27, 2019). [[Executive Order 13880]] followed on July 11, 2019, directing agencies to supply citizenship records to the Bureau instead. 2. **The apportionment exclusion** — a presidential memorandum of July 21, 2020 directing that people without lawful status be left out of the base. [[Trump v. New York]] dismissed the challenge as unripe on December 18, 2020, and the Biden administration rescinded the memorandum in January 2021. No merits ruling was ever reached, which is why the question returned for 2030 ([[2030 Census Residence Rule]]). ## How good was it The Bureau's post-enumeration survey (2022) found the national total statistically indistinguishable from zero net error, but with large, patterned errors underneath it. There were net undercounts of Black, Hispanic and reservation American Indian residents and net overcounts of non-Hispanic White and Asian residents; the rates are on [[Census Undercount]]. By state, six were undercounted: Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. Eight were overcounted: Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Utah. Under [[Title 13]] § 195 none of these estimates can change a seat. The state table has had a second life on the right. A 2022 [[Heritage Foundation]] commentary by [[Hans von Spakovsky]] read it as a count that shorted Republican states: Florida by two seats, Texas by one, with Minnesota and Rhode Island keeping seats they should have lost. The measured error runs along the lines the citizenship-question fight is about. Florida and Texas both have large Hispanic populations, the group with the largest measured net undercount. A question that depresses Hispanic response would widen the shortfall that argument complains of. ## See also - [[Census]] · [[Census Bureau]] · [[How the Census Is Actually Counted]] · [[How the Census Apportions Congress]] - [[Census Undercount]] · [[Census Citizenship Question]] · [[Department of Commerce v. New York]] · [[Trump v. New York]] - [[Differential Privacy]] · [[Method of Equal Proportions]] · [[Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929]] - [[2030 Census]] · [[Redistricting Timeline 2025-2026]]