Jamie Raskin Questions Census Attorney on Differential Privacy and Apportionment

Constitutional Basis for Census Counting

• 📜 The 14th Amendment, Section 1, defines citizens, while Section 2 mandates apportionment based on the "whole number of persons" in each state, indicating a distinction between citizens and persons.
• 🎯 The framers understood this distinction, using "citizens" when they meant citizens and "persons" when they meant all individuals, supporting the counting of all persons for the census.
• ⚖️ Historical debates, including the 1929 Apportionment Act, have affirmed that the census should count the entire population, not just voters or citizens, despite arguments to exclude certain groups like "unnaturalized aliens" or specific ethnic groups.

The Controversy of Differential Privacy

• ❓ Differential privacy is a method to protect individual data by injecting statistical noise or masking information, preventing identification through the combination of census data and publicly available web data.
• 📍 This technique was not used at the state level for congressional apportionment in the 2020 census, according to the witness.
• 📍 It was, however, applied at lower levels, such as the census block and census tract levels.

Impact on Redistricting and Data Swapping

• 📊 While differential privacy may not affect congressional reapportionment, it impacts redistricting at local levels, including city council and county council races, and all redistricting within a state.
• 🔒 The adoption of differential privacy was to adhere to Section 9 of Title 13, which prohibits the release of personal information derived from census data, ensuring raw data is not publicly released.
• 🔄 In previous censuses (2000, 2010, 1990), the Census Bureau used data swapping to scramble granular data at the block level, a method that was not seen as problematic until the implementation of differential privacy.
• ⚠️ The witness argues that differential privacy was adopted by the Trump administration in the 2020 census, marking its first-ever use in this context.