America First Legal is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the dismissal of its lawsuit challenging statistical methods used in the 2020 Census, arguing that alleged counting errors affected congressional representation and Electoral College apportionment.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
America First Legal has taken its legal challenge over the 2020 Census to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to revive a lawsuit that contends the Census Bureau relied on statistical techniques that produced inaccurate state population totals and affected the distribution of seats in Congress and the Electoral College.
The organization, co-founded by Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, filed a jurisdictional statement with the Supreme Court on Aug. 7 seeking review of a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
A divided three-judge panel dismissed the case in July, concluding that the plaintiffs lacked standing and that the challenge had been brought too late.
Judge Steven Merryday dissented from that ruling and questioned the consequences of preventing a substantive challenge to the census count.
“If the census and the vote are not right, nothing that follows from them is right,” Merryday wrote.
At the center of America First Legal’s case is the constitutional requirement for an “actual Enumeration” of the population and the Census Bureau’s use of methods including statistical imputation to account for people whose information could not otherwise be obtained.
The group argues that those procedures departed from the type of direct population count required for congressional apportionment and produced disparities among states.
According to figures cited by AFL, Florida’s population was undercounted by approximately 3.48%, representing roughly 760,000 residents. The organization says other Republican-leaning and politically competitive states were also undercounted, while several Democratic-leaning states were overcounted.
AFL argues those discrepancies had consequences extending beyond census statistics because population totals determine how the 435 seats in the U.S. House are divided among the states and, in turn, affect the number of Electoral College votes each state receives.
The organization maintains that Florida did not receive representation corresponding to its actual population growth and that errors elsewhere allowed some states to retain or receive congressional representation they otherwise might not have obtained.
AFL has also cited Census Bureau data indicating that nearly 11 million people were counted through imputation in the 2020 Census, almost twice the number attributed through that process in 2010.
Emily Percival, senior counsel at America First Legal, said the case asks the Supreme Court to enforce what the organization views as the constitutional requirement for a direct population count.
“The Constitution calls for an ‘actual enumeration’ of the people so Congress can accurately allocate representatives among the states. The Census Bureau failed in 2020 to complete this count,” Percival said. “We are asking the Supreme Court to step in to hold the Bureau to this Constitutional standard. Americans deserve to have their voices heard through accurate representation in Congress.”
One area specifically challenged by AFL involves Group Quarters imputation, a procedure used in settings such as college dormitories, many of which were disrupted or emptied during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The lawsuit has also challenged the Census Bureau’s use of Differential Privacy, a method designed to protect individual confidentiality by introducing statistical “noise” into census data.
AFL argues that these techniques resulted in population figures that did not correspond precisely to individuals directly counted in particular locations and says their use raises questions under federal restrictions on statistical sampling for purposes of congressional apportionment.
The group contends that the resulting population shifts disproportionately harmed states including Florida and Texas while benefiting states with larger Democratic voting blocs.
The dispute also comes against a broader political and legal fight over who should be included in census-based apportionment. During Donald Trump’s presidency, his administration sought to add a citizenship question to the census and later attempted to exclude illegal immigrants from the population totals used to divide congressional seats among the states.
America First Legal argues that the statistical procedures used for the 2020 count compounded those earlier disputes by locking alleged population errors into the congressional map and Electoral College allocation for the decade following the census.
The organization is now asking the Supreme Court not only to review the underlying census methods but also to address the procedural grounds on which the lower court rejected the case.
AFL contends that allowing the district court’s dismissal to stand would make it difficult to bring meaningful legal challenges to census errors after the government completes the count and distributes the resulting population totals, despite mechanisms created by Congress for disputes involving apportionment.
The Supreme Court has not yet determined whether it will hear the case.
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