[EL] The Next Census Battle: Privacy

[Nate Persily]

I have been watching the assorted (and sordid) census battles quite
closely, but for various reasons have remained silent (except for an
offhand tweet to correct the record).   The announcement of the creation of
a potential redistricting database with citizenship data derived from
administrative records, however, raises a set of issues that overlap with
those I have been confronting in my non-election law life— the effort to
make Facebook data available for academic research in a secure, privacy
protected way.  (see www.socialscience.one)    Indeed, I feel like my
academic worlds are colliding a bit these days as census and redistricting
issues are colliding with disinformation and privacy.

For now, let me just pose this cryptic question to anyone on the listserve
who might know:

How will the combination of (1) citizenship data derived from
administrative records and (2) the redistricting data made available
through the PL 94-171 datafile affect the Census Bureau’s plans to use
differential privacy for block level redistricting data?

For those of you in the redistricting world who do not know what
differential privacy is (or the Bureau’s plans to use it in 2020), you are
going to hear a lot about this in the coming year, I am afraid.  And for
those who think the math involved with measures of partisan symmetry is too
much for courts to handle, you ain’t seen nothing yet.


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Nate Persily

James B. McClatchy Professor of Law
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610
(917) 570-3223
npersily at stanford.edu

www.persily.com
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