TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Katharine Heriges on May 31, 2019
The American Civil Liberties Union informed the U.S. Supreme Court in a letter yesterday that new evidence suggests that the Trump administration is adding a citizenship question to the census to create an election advantage for Republicans, the ABA Journal reports. The U.S. Supreme Court put the case on a fast track amid a June deadline for printing the census forms for 2020. According to ACLU lawyer Dale Ho, Republican redistricting specialist Dr. Thomas Hofeller played a significant role in orchestrating addition of the question to the census. The ACLU alleges Hofeller had concluded in a 2015 study that a citizenship question would clearly disadvantage Democrats when census data is used in redistricting, and he helped ghostwrite a DOJ letter asking the Commerce Department to add the question.