Jeff Landry: Accurate Census Protects Our Republic

Late last month, my office and the American people received great news from the White House: our petition to reinstate the citizenship question in the decennial 2020 Census was approved. We will once again get a more accurate count of how many American citizens reside in our country.

As the chief legal officer of Louisiana and a former member of Congress – I know how critical the data concerning citizenship, legal immigration, illegal immigration, and the distribution of the population is to the functions of government. It is also crucial in terms of ensuring fair and equitable districting of the people’s representatives at the State and Federal levels. This issue touches the heart of our republic and the constitutional rights of every citizen.

The decision by Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to ask if one is a citizen or not is no new idea. For decades, the Census Bureau included a citizenship question on the “long form” questionnaire sent to nearly one in every six households during each decennial census. The long form’s replacement – the American Community Survey – also collects information regarding citizenship and estimates citizen voting-age population, though its estimates have a much higher margin of error since it is sent to far fewer people.

The move by Secretary Ross is important because States generally apportion their legislative districts based on census numbers. Counting everyone regardless of legal status dilutes the votes of all legally-eligible voters by not only bolstering the representation of illegal immigrants and non-voting legal immigrants at the expense of the voting age citizenry, but by also skewing the national data and some States losing Congressional representation.

Furthermore, the reinstatement restores the rule of law. The Supreme Court has held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits “vote dilution” by state and local jurisdictions engaged in redistricting, which can occur when a racial group is improperly deprived of a single-member district in which it could form a majority.

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