[EL] Equalizing CVAP without citizenship question

[Jeff Wice]

The Census Bureau informed participants at a recent National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) redistricting seminar that it has been asked by the Commerce Department to look into providing citizenship data derived from the ACS in the PL 94-171 datafile provided to the states. No decision has yet been made.
I recently came upon an expert statement submitted to a New York federal district court by the late Tom Hofeller where he said: "When the Census Bureau initiated the ACS process, it was made clear that the ACS data were not intended for use in redistricting and were certainly not included in the details’ small area tabulations to be released in conjunction with the Public Law 94-171 data generated for the Census Bureau’s Redistricting Data Program.”
Tom elaborated on this in detail in his report submitted to the New York eastern district federal court in the case Boone et al v. Nassau County Legislature et al (see document no. 44-4 in case 2:11-cv-02712). Readers who are interested in reading the entire explanation can email mail me directly for a copy.
Jeff Wice
via Newton Mail [https://cloudmagic.com/k/d/mailapp?ct=dx&cv=10.0.18&pv=10.14.5&source=email_footer_2]
On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 10:50 PM, Douglas Johnson <djohnson at ndcresearch.com> wrote:
All of those options include both measurable and unmeasurable margins of error, the former of which could be calculated and used to determine the odds that all the districts are within the allowed spread. For Congress, that’s near-impossible. It might work for some legislative plans.
- Doug
On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 6:53 PM Kogan, Vladimir < kogan.18 at osu.edu [kogan.18 at osu.edu] > wrote:
Relatedly, is there anything that would prevent the Trump administration from directing the Census Bureau to put out block level CVAP estimates by appending Census counts to other administrative data (which critics of the citizenship questions have argued all along provide more accurate citizenship info) for easy redistricting use?



From: Kogan, Vladimir
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2019 9:15 PM
To: Election Law Listserv < law-election at uci.edu [law-election at uci.edu] >
Subject: Equalizing CVAP without citizenship question



Question: Suppose that (1) the citizenship question stays off the 2020 census and (2) at least one state decides to redistrict by equalizing CVAP anyway using the American Community Survey citizenship estimates (combined with the 2020 population counts).



Have any courts ruled on the question of how to navigate population equality requirements with data subject to considerable statistical uncertainty due to sampling? I know CVAP is used all the time in the context of VRA compliance; are there any cases from that area that speak to this question? (I realize Evenwel left open the question of whether equalizing CVAP was permissible, but it seems like there are five votes on that question.)



Thanks!



Vlad




Vladimir Kogan , Associate Professor
Department of Political Science

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