# Thomas Hofeller %% census-comment-callout:start — time-limited notice, remove after 2026-11-02 %% > [!important] Comment on the proposed census rule by Monday, November 2, 2026 > The Census Bureau has proposed rewriting who gets counted in the census, and where. Anyone can comment before the period closes. > > **What the proposed rule would change** > - **Who counts toward House seats:** Only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents would count toward apportionment. As written, the rule would leave out international students, work-visa holders, refugees and asylees. > - **Where you count:** Your "usual residence" would be wherever you lawfully spent the most days between January 3 and April 1, as shown by your tax records. That test can put snowbirds, college students, people who moved and service members in the wrong place. > - **What the form can ask:** The census form could no longer ask about race and ethnicity, which it has asked in some form in every census since 1790. The American Community Survey would keep them. > > **How to comment** > 1. Use the official comment form on [Regulations.gov](https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/USBC-2026-0628-0001) (docket USBC-2026-0628). > 2. Write in your own words how the change would affect you or your community. Specific, original comments count for more than form letters. > 3. Submit by **November 2**. Comments become public record. The Bureau accepts anonymous comments if you enter "N/A" in the required name fields. > > **Need help?** [Hands Off Our Census](https://handsoffourcens.us/) is a nonpartisan coalition of census and data-policy groups. It has a [step-by-step comment guide](https://handsoffourcens.us/comment-guide.html), a [plain-language explainer](https://handsoffourcens.us/proposal.html) and a [Spanish-language page](https://handsoffourcens.us/comentarios.html). > > **Background:** [[2030 Census Residence Rule]] · [[How the Census Apportions Congress]] %% census-comment-callout:end %% **Thomas Brooks Hofeller** (April 14, 1943 – August 16, 2018) was the Republican Party's chief redistricting strategist for most of four decades. The journalist David Daley called him "the master of the modern gerrymander." He drew or shaped maps in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and many other states. He also taught Republican legislators how to draw them without leaving evidence: "Emails are the tool of the devil," one of his training slides warned. Then he died with roughly 75,000 files on his backup drives. Those files showed that the Trump administration's push to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census traced back to a study Hofeller wrote in 2015. The study concluded that drawing districts on a citizens-only population count would be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites," and that it could not be done without a citizenship question on the census. The files reached the Supreme Court 28 days before it decided the census case. Within months they also helped strike down North Carolina's legislative maps. ## Why it matters - **He connects the census to the map.** The citizenship question was sold as a tool to protect minority voters under the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]]. Hofeller's study described a tool to shrink their representation. The Hofeller files are the clearest documentary link between the two. - **His career spans the whole modern gerrymander.** He was there for the computerization of mapmaking in the 1970s, the Republican use of the Voting Rights Act in the 1980s, the [[RedMap Project]] payoff in 2011, and the Supreme Court's exit from partisan-gerrymandering cases in 2019. - **The idea outlived him.** The 2026 proposal to count only citizens and green-card holders toward House seats (see [[2030 Census Residence Rule]]) is a different lever from the one he studied, but it relies on the same data and the same goal. ## Career Hofeller was born in San Diego and served on a Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War. He earned a political science degree at Claremont McKenna College and a Ph.D. in government from Claremont Graduate School. - **Early 1970s:** built a computerized mapping system for the California State Assembly, years before map-drawing software was common. - **Early 1980s:** joined the [[Republican National Committee]] to run its data operations. His redistricting role there was formalized in 1989. - **1980s:** led the Republican strategy of using the Voting Rights Act to push Southern states toward more majority-Black districts. Packing Black voters into fewer districts made the surrounding districts whiter and easier for Republicans to win (see [[Packing and Cracking]]). Mark Braden, a former RNC chief counsel, said Hofeller "played a key role across the South in the destruction of the traditional Democratic Party." He testified as an expert witness in [[Thornburg v. Gingles]], the case that made majority-Black districts central to map-drawing. According to his *New York Times* obituary, he testified for the Black plaintiffs there, and he helped the side arguing that partisan gerrymanders could be struck down in *Davis v. Bandemer* (1986), at a time when Democratic legislatures drew most of the maps. - **1990s:** worked at the Agriculture Department and served as staff director of a House committee overseeing the census. - **1999 onward:** returned to redistricting full-time as a consultant to the RNC and other Republican clients. - **2009–2018:** FEC filings reviewed by *Mother Jones* show the RNC paid him more than $2 million from June 2009 until his death, including about $422,000 after Trump's 2017 inauguration. He died of cancer at his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 75. ### How he described the job Hofeller was candid in public about what redistricting is. "Redistricting is like an election in reverse," he said. "In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters." His training presentations for Republican legislators and staff were full of rules of thumb that colleagues called "Hofellerisms," including "Don't reveal more than necessary" and "Emails are the tool of the devil." ## North Carolina: where his maps were tested Republicans won both chambers of the North Carolina General Assembly in 2010, for the first time in more than a century, in the wave that the [[RedMap Project]] and [[Art Pope]]'s state network helped organize. Hofeller drew the maps that followed. Several were later found unconstitutional: | Plan | What happened in court | |---|---| | **2011 congressional map** | In [[Cooper v. Harris]] (May 22, 2017) the Supreme Court held that Districts 1 and 12 were racial gerrymanders. | | **2011 legislative maps** | In [[North Carolina v. Covington]] a federal court struck down 28 state House and Senate districts as racial gerrymanders. The Supreme Court affirmed in June 2017. | | **2016 congressional map** | Redrawn after the 2011 map fell. The redistricting chair, Rep. David Lewis, said: "I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats." Hofeller drew it. In [[Rucho v. Common Cause]] (June 27, 2019) the Supreme Court held that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims at all. A North Carolina state court then blocked the map for the 2020 election in October 2019. | | **2017 remedial legislative maps** | Drawn to replace the districts struck in *Covington*. Struck down in [[Common Cause v. Lewis]] (September 3, 2019) as partisan gerrymanders under the state constitution, with Hofeller's own files as key evidence. | In a January 2017 deposition in a federal lawsuit over the congressional maps, Hofeller testified that he had received no written instructions from Republican legislators. ## The 2015 citizenship study In 2015 the Supreme Court agreed to hear [[Evenwel v. Abbott]], which asked whether states could, or must, draw legislative districts by counting eligible voters instead of total population. A citizens-only count would leave out noncitizens and children, who are concentrated in Latino and Democratic-leaning areas. (The principle at stake is [[One Person One Vote]].) In August 2015 the principal of the [[Washington Free Beacon]], a conservative website backed by the hedge-fund billionaire [[Paul Singer]], commissioned Hofeller to study what such a switch would do. His unpublished study, later filed in federal court, concluded: - Using citizen voting-age population was not workable "[w]ithout a question on citizenship being included on the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire." - The results "would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" and "would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats." - The change could be expected to "provoke a high degree of resistance from Democrats and the major minority groups in the nation." His case study used the Texas House of Representatives. Under a citizens-only count, districts with large Latino populations or Democratic incumbents, especially in South Texas, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley, would lose population. That would let Republican mapmakers stretch those districts to absorb more Democratic voters and strengthen the Republican seats around them. The Supreme Court decided *Evenwel* unanimously on April 4, 2016. It held that states *may* use total population, and left open whether they may use something else. Hofeller's study was a plan for that open question. ## From the study to the Justice Department letter | Date | Event | |---|---| | Aug 2015 | Hofeller is commissioned to study redistricting on a citizens-only count. | | Early 2017 | Commerce Secretary [[Wilbur Ross]] starts pursuing a citizenship question, about a week into his tenure, according to the record the Supreme Court later reviewed. | | Aug 30, 2017 | Hofeller creates a document containing a paragraph that justifies the question as needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act (per its file metadata). | | ~Oct 2017 | [[Mark Neuman]], Ross's adviser on the census and a friend of Hofeller's, gives Justice Department official [[John Gore]] a draft letter requesting the question. It contains Hofeller's paragraph word for word. | | Dec 2017 | The Justice Department formally asks Commerce to add the question, citing Voting Rights Act enforcement. Its structure and arguments closely track Hofeller's 2015 study. | | Mar 26, 2018 | Ross orders the question added to the 2020 form. | | Aug 16, 2018 | Hofeller dies. | Under oath, Neuman testified that Hofeller was "the first person" to raise the question with him. He said Hofeller framed it as a way to maximize Latino representation, and denied relying on him for Voting Rights Act expertise. The Justice Department said Gore "had never heard" of the 2015 study and that it "played no role" in the December 2017 request. Neither Neuman nor Gore had disclosed the draft letter when they testified; Gore revealed it later in a congressional interview. The stated purpose of the question was to protect minority voting rights. The study at the root of it described a way to reduce minority voting power. ## How the files surfaced Hofeller's estranged daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, was sorting his belongings after his death when she found a bag of four external hard drives and 18 thumb drives, backups of his laptop, which her mother had given her. Late in 2018 she contacted the Raleigh office of [[Common Cause]] for help finding a lawyer for an unrelated family matter. Only after several conversations did she mention the drives. Common Cause was then preparing [[Common Cause v. Lewis]], its challenge to the 2017 legislative maps Hofeller had drawn, and obtained the files in discovery in that case. On May 30, 2019, plaintiffs challenging the citizenship question filed the Hofeller evidence in federal court in New York and notified the Supreme Court. Arguments had been heard five weeks earlier; the decision was due within a month. ## What the files changed, and what they didn't **The census case.** On June 24, 2019, Judge George Hazel of the federal district court in Maryland, hearing a separate challenge, said the new evidence suggested Hofeller "played a potentially significant role" in building the rationale for the question. He said he would reopen that case if the appeals court allowed it. Three days later, in [[Department of Commerce v. New York]] (June 27, 2019), Chief Justice [[John Roberts]] held that the Voting Rights Act rationale "seems to have been contrived" and sent the decision back to the agency. The majority did not cite the Hofeller files. Its finding of pretext rested on the administrative record. The files answered the question the Court left open: what the real reason was. The same day, in [[Rucho v. Common Cause]], the Court ruled that federal courts cannot police partisan gerrymanders like Hofeller's 2016 congressional map. **The aftermath in Washington.** On July 2, 2019, Commerce announced that the census forms would print without the question. On July 11 Trump dropped it and signed [[Executive Order 13880]], ordering agencies to hand citizenship records to the [[Census Bureau]] instead. On July 17 the House voted 230–198 to hold Attorney General [[William Barr]] and Secretary Ross in criminal contempt for withholding subpoenaed documents about how the question came about. **North Carolina.** In [[Common Cause v. Lewis]], the files did decide the outcome. Plaintiffs said they showed Hofeller had "substantially completed" the 2017 legislative maps by June 2017, at a time when legislative leaders were telling a federal court they had not started drawing. A plaintiffs' expert, Jowei Chen, testified that Hofeller had entered a field showing the Black voting-age population of each district into nearly every draft. Legislators had said racial data was not used. On September 3, 2019, a three-judge state court struck down the maps as partisan gerrymanders under the North Carolina Constitution and ordered them redrawn. **Making the files public.** On November 4, 2019, the court released Hofeller's files on other states from its protective order. They cover work in Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, among others. On January 5, 2020, Stephanie Hofeller posted copies online herself. ## The plan after him The 2019 ruling held that a citizenship question is constitutional if the government gives its real reason. The administration took a different route: build citizenship data from government records instead. [[Executive Order 13880]] was revoked in January 2021, and the final 2020 apportionment counted all residents. The goal returned in Trump's second term. In August 2025 Trump called for a census that would not count people in the country illegally. The [[2030 Census Residence Rule]], proposed in September 2026, would count only citizens and lawful permanent residents toward House seats, and invites comments on adding a legal-status question to the census form. Hofeller's study and the 2026 rule pull different levers: - **Hofeller's study was about redistricting**: drawing districts *inside* a state on a citizens-only count. That moves political power from Latino and Democratic areas to white and Republican ones within each state. - **The 2026 rule is about apportionment**: dividing the 435 House seats *among* the states (see [[How the Census Apportions Congress]]). That moves seats and electoral votes away from states with large noncitizen populations. Both rely on citizenship data the 2020 census did not collect, which is why the fight over the question never ended. The lesson the government took from 2019 was about procedure: give an honest reason through a public rulemaking record that a court will have a harder time calling pretext. ## Why it's on the map Hofeller is the clearest example on this wiki of the operative as infrastructure: a technician almost no voter had heard of, whose work decided which voters counted for how much. His career shows how the right turned redistricting into a decade-long project, from computerized mapping to the Voting Rights Act alliance to [[RedMap Project]]. His death shows the limit of telling everyone else to avoid a paper trail. The man who warned that emails were "the tool of the devil" kept the most complete record of the project, and it was used against the maps he drew. ## See also - [[Census Citizenship Question]]: the question itself, from 1820 to 2030 - [[Department of Commerce v. New York]]: the 2019 case the files arrived in - [[Mark Neuman]] · [[John Gore]]: the adviser who carried his paragraph to the Justice Department, and the official who drafted the request - [[Gerrymandering]] · [[Packing and Cracking]]: the craft he practiced - [[RedMap Project]] · [[Art Pope]]: the 2010 strategy that put his North Carolina maps in play - [[Rucho v. Common Cause]] · [[Cooper v. Harris]] · [[North Carolina v. Covington]] · [[Common Cause v. Lewis]]: his maps in court - [[Evenwel v. Abbott]] · [[One Person One Vote]]: the population-base question his study addressed - [[2030 Census Residence Rule]] · [[Census Undercount]] · [[Mid-Decade Redistricting]]: where the fight stands now