Trey Mayfield on False 2020 Census Data and Differential Privacy

Constitutional Mandate for the Census

• 📜 The U.S. Constitution mandates an 'actual enumeration' every 10 years, primarily for apportioning House of Representatives members.
• 🏛️ This constitutional requirement, found in Article 1 and reiterated in the 14th Amendment, emphasizes an actual counting of the population, not estimation.
• ⚖️ Dictionaries from the time of ratification confirm that 'enumeration' means an actual count, a principle established to prevent fraud in representation.

Prohibition of Statistical Adjustments for Apportionment

• 🚫 Congress has consistently prohibited statistical adjustments in census data used for apportionment purposes since 1790.
• 📊 While statistical adjustments may be permissible for other uses like federal fund dispersal or demographic data, they are banned for the core enumeration function.
• ⚠️ Using such methods for enumeration risks an inaccurate, invalid, and unconstitutional census.

The 2020 Census and Differential Privacy

• 💻 Civil servants at the Census Bureau applied a methodology called differential privacy to the 2020 census, purportedly to meet data anonymization requirements.
• ❌ This method is argued to violate the Constitution's 'actual enumeration' requirement and congressional prohibitions.
• 🔬 The bureau refused to allow peer review of differential privacy or disclose the data supporting its necessity over previous methods like data swapping.

Impact of Differential Privacy

• 📈 Differential privacy altered both the count and characteristics of individuals and households at various geographic levels below the state.
• 🏘️ Examples show significant artificial population changes in specific towns (e.g., Port Royal, VA increased 87%; Stony Creek, VA decreased 43%).
• 🧩 The method effectively moves people around within states, adding fake populations where they don't live and subtracting real people from where they do.

Opposition and Consequences

• 🗣️ Opposition to differential privacy was unanimous among census stakeholders, including outside scientists, statisticians, governmental actors, and interest groups.
• 📉 Critics argue it is illegal, data-corrupting, and addresses a non-existent problem.
• 🗺️ The use of fake population data makes core governmental responsibilities, like drawing district lines and allocating resources, difficult to carry out.
• ❌ Consequently, all reported enumeration census data from 2020 below the state level is considered false.