WASHINGTON, D.C, – Today, Senator Jim Banks (R-Ind.) sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate and correct significant errors from the 2020 Census that may have improperly shifted congressional representation and Electoral College votes to Democrats and illegal aliens.
Senator Banks warned that, among other problems, the Biden administration used a controversial statistical method called differential privacy—which intentionally scrambles population data—to interpret and publicize Census data. The 2020 Census also counted illegal aliens without requesting their citizenship status.
In part, the letter reads:
“As problematic as the 2020 Census was for apportionment, it may have been disastrous for redistricting. Differential privacy alters the total population of individual voting districts, meaning that any voting district drawn since the 2020 census may in fact have been based on false data and may even be unlawful. The worst part is that we don’t know how many voting districts are problematic. A file containing the original, unaltered census data exists, but only a few bureaucrats have access to it.”
“It is crucial that the Census Bureau republishes the 2020 Census using the raw data so that states have a clear picture of their voting districts. The Census Bureau must also use a methodology for the 2030 census that accurately counts state and voting district populations and that does not disproportionately benefit one political party.”
Click here to see the full letter or see text below:
Dear Secretary Lutnick:
I urge you to investigate and correct errors from the 2020 Census that handed disproportionate political power to Democrats and illegal aliens. The Census Bureau adopted a new and opaque methodology called differential privacy that, by design, scrambles the populations of states and voting districts. As prepared by the Biden administration, the 2020 Census reports miscounted the population of fourteen states,[1]wrongly allocating six congressional seats and Electoral College votes to the Democrat party. The reports may have also miscounted the population in a number of voting districts. And the reports definitively included illegal aliens without tracking those aliens’ citizenship status. If left uncorrected, these errors will continue diluting the political power of American citizens.
Census data plays a crucial role in allocating political representation and government funding. Under the Constitution, each state gets Congressional representatives—and Electoral College votes—based on “the whole number of persons” within the state.[2] The number of persons is in turn established by a constitutionally-mandated decennial census.[3] Federal agencies rely on census data to allocate billions of dollars in federal funding, much of which hinges on population. And states use census data to draw congressional and voting districts, which the Supreme Court has held must be equal within a state.[4]
The integrity of the American political system depends on knowing exactly how many people are in each state—and each voting district. In the past, the Census Bureau has gotten those numbers right without statistically significant errors.[5]
But in 2020, the Census Bureau made widespread errors. These errors happened for various reasons—but in part because the Census Bureau published census data using a new methodology that intentionally miscounted the population and masked demographic data.[6] The methodology, differential privacy, injects noise into individual voting districts (called blocks for census purposes). Differential privacy achieves this by randomly changing some correct demographic data into false demographic data in order to make it impossible to guess individual residents’ identities within a census block. Bureaucrats have been architecting differential privacy for over twenty years, and the Biden administration used the methodology when interpreting and publishing data from the 2020 Census.
Differential privacy is opaque and liable to mistaken count totals. Sure enough, the 2020 Census overcounted the population in eight states and undercounted it in six.[7] The most extreme undercount was Arkansas, at 5.04%, and the largest overcount was Hawaii, at 6.79%. As a result of these errors, Democrats gained at least six net congressional seats—and Electoral College votes.[8]
As problematic as the 2020 Census was for apportionment, it may have been disastrous for redistricting. Differential privacy alters the total population of individual voting districts, meaning that any voting district drawn since the 2020 census may in fact have been based on false data and may even be unlawful. The worst part is that we don’t know how many voting districts are problematic. A file containing the original, unaltered census data exists, but only a few bureaucrats have access to it.
It is crucial that the Census Bureau republishes the 2020 Census using the raw data so that states have a clear picture of their voting districts. The Census Bureau must also use a methodology for the 2030 Census that accurately counts state and voting district populations and that does not disproportionately benefit one political party.
Finally, it is crucial that the Census Bureau take steps to ensure that the 2030 Census does not allocate political power to illegal aliens. Counting illegal aliens as part of a state’s population means that states with more illegal aliens get more government funding and more voting power. States with sanctuary cities benefit the most.
Although the Supreme Court stopped the Trump administration from requesting citizenship and excluding illegal aliens from the 2020 Census, that decision was purely procedural and did not address whether individuals who are present in the country unlawfully may be excluded from the census.[9] There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.[10] At the very least, the American people and their representatives deserve to know how many people are here unlawfully. The 2030 Census must therefore request citizenship status—and ensure that differential privacy is not used to mask citizenship data.
To this end, I ask that you respond to the following questions by November 6, 2025:
- Does the Census Bureau intend to republish the 2020 Census results using unaltered data so states can fully understand apportionment and districting errors?
- What measures are the Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau taking to correct the errors in the 2020 Census that led to the improper apportionment of political power across the states?
- Does the Census Bureau intend to abandon the “differential privacy” methodology for the 2030 census and return to a method that presents accurate counts of state and voting district populations?
- Does the Census Bureau intend to request the citizenship status of illegal aliens in the 2030 Census?
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
###