[EL] Why Asking About Citizenship Could Make the Census Less Accurate

[Kogan, Vladimir]

I don't mean to defend the Trump DOJ, but I think we should remember that concerns about using the American Community Survey to measure citizenship were raised during the last redistricting cycle. For example, see here<https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Redistricting_PolicyBrief4_forWeb.pdf> or here<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1724982>. From what I remember, one of the concerns was that the ACS sample size is smaller than the previously used Census long form, so the estimates are necessarily less precise. At the smallest level of geographic aggregation, such as Census blocks, the standard errors are huge. The second concern was that to generate estimates at these small scales, the ACS has to pool data across multiple years, which can introduce error if there are changes in migration patterns and/or increase in naturalization rates. For example, if there was a sharp increase in naturalization rates among Latinos after the Trump election or an influx of (citizen) Puerto Ricans as a result of Hurricane Maria, the pooled ACS data may systematically underestimate Latino CVAP, especially in states like Florida.

This issue also came up in Evenwel - see, e.g,. the Persily et al. brief<https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work/Evenwel_Amicus%20for%20Nathaniel%20Persily.pdf> arguing that the ACS estimates are too imprecise to comply with one-person, one vote.

Of course, it's entirely reasonable to believe that adding a citizenship question to the Census will create more problems than it solves. But it does make me wonder whether the administration's long game is really to generate the data that a state like Texas could use to redistrict on the basis of CVAP, rather than total population, which Evenwel left open as a possibility.


[The Ohio State University]
Vladimir Kogan, Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
2004 Derby Hall | 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1373
510/415-4074 Mobile
614/292-9498 Office
614/292-1146 Fax
http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/
kogan.18 at osu.edu<mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu>


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