Duchin and other experts who spoke to WIRED say that differential privacy does not change apportionment, or how seats in Congress are distributed—several red states, including Texas and Florida, gained representation after the 2020 census, while blue states like California lost representatives.
COUNTing the cost
On August 28, Republican Representative August Pfluger introduced the COUNT Act. If passed, it would add a citizenship question to the census and force the Census Bureau to “cease utilization of the differential privacy process.” Pfluger’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Differential privacy is a punching bag that’s meant here as an excuse to redo the census,” says Duchin. “That is what’s going on, if you ask me.”
On October 6, Senator Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana, sent a letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, urging him to “investigate and correct errors from the 2020 Census that handed disproportionate political power to Democrats and illegal aliens.” The letter goes on to allege that the use of differential privacy “alters the total population of individual voting districts.” Similar to the COUNT Act and the Renewing America post, the letter also states that the 2030 Census “must request citizenship status.”
Peter Bernegger, a Wisconsin-based “election integrity” activist who is facing a criminal charge of simulating the legal process for allegedly falsifying a subpoena, amplified Banks’ letter on X, alleging that the use of differential privacy was part of “election rigging by the Obama/Biden administrations.” Bernegger’s post was viewed more than 236,000 times.
Banks’ office and Bernegger did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“No differential privacy was ever applied to the data used to apportion the House of Representatives, so the claim that seats in the House were affected is simply false,” says John Abowd, former associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the United States Census Bureau. Abowd oversaw the implementation of differential privacy while at the Census Bureau. He says that the data from the 2020 census has been successfully used by red and blue states, as well as redistricting commissions, and that the only difference from previous census data was that no one would be able to “reconstruct accurate, identifiable individual data to enhance the other databases that they use (voter rolls, drivers licenses, etc.).”
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