Trump Is Rigging the Census

The Mother Jones Podcast

The US census is conducted every 10 years and determines how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding is allocated, how much representation states receive, and how political districts are drawn. But next year’s could be different: The Trump administration wants to add a question asking for the respondent’s citizenship.

Voting rights experts say such a move has the potential to derail the entire census—and shift power to the Republican Party for the next decade—because it will greatly reduce the number of people willing to participate. If large numbers of immigrants, for example, don’t respond to the census, which has not asked about citizenship since 1950, the areas where they live could lose federal funding and representatives in Congress, and economic and political power could shift to whiter and more Republicans areas.

Three federal courts have struck down the citizenship question so far, and it was recently in front of the Supreme Court. On this week’s show, host Jamilah King talks about what’s at stake now with Dale Ho, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project who recently went up against the government in oral arguments at the high court, and Mother Jones’s voting rights guru Ari Berman.