David Catron writes for the American Spectator about the need for census reform.
When the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act on April 10 it took a good first step toward the restoration of election integrity, assuming the Senate also passes it and President Trump signs it into law before the 2026 midterms. Nonetheless, until Congress imposes major reforms on the U.S. Census Bureau and its hopelessly Byzantine methods of gathering data for the constitutionally mandated census, it can’t be relied upon to produce accurate results. In the era of Big Data this bureaucracy’s aging systems and institutional inertia all but guarantee the kind of inefficiency and corruption that DOGE has discovered in other federal agencies.
The purpose of the census is, of course, to determine the number of seats each state will have in the U.S. House of Representatives, how much of our federal tax money will be distributed to these states, and the number of Electoral College votes each state commands. Consequently, the post-census reapportionment can have a profound effect on the outcome of presidential and congressional elections. Indeed, during major population shifts such as the increasing tendency of Americans to flee Democrat-leaning states for Republican-leaning states, the 2030 census may well produce a decades-long realignment in Washington.
This migration from blue to red states began long before the 2020 census and was expected to produce greater power shifts in Congress and the Electoral College than actually materialized. Thus, when the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability examined the Census Bureau’s Post-Enumeration Survey (PES), it revealed significant miscounts in 14 states. Moreover, a statistically implausible number of the overcounts favored Democrat-leaning states and an equally unlikely number of undercounts penalized Republican-leaning states. …
… A quick glance … immediately reveals a blindingly obvious partisan pattern: Delaware (+5.45 percent), Hawaii (+6.79 percent), Massachusetts (+2.24 percent), Minnesota (+3.84 percent), New York (+3.44 percent) and Rhode Island (+5.05 percent). As Chairman Comer points out above, only two of the eight overcounted states lean Republican — Ohio (+1.49 percent) and Utah (+2.59 percent). These eight states have been receiving a far greater share of federal largesse than they are entitled to — much of it at the expense of the five undercounted states.
