This is only tangentially related, but I think it provides important context to this discussion about the motives of those involved.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que...
Counting illegal immigrants in the census helps Democrats because liberal states have more of them. This is just a fact. You may think we should still count as many of them in the census, that's fine. But don't pretend there is no issue with one side of the argument.
Mentioning motives of one side but not the other is naive. It also prevents us from having a real conversation about the trade offs at hand.
When deviating from the mandate, it's important to consider motives. When aligning with the mandate, unless it's clear that the mandate is ill-formed (which it isn't in this case for the reasons I've given above), motives for enforcing the mandate are, as said above, irrelevant.
Now if Democrats were trying to increase census coverage in Florida, Texas, NY, and IL while playing games to get census takers to skip traversing the vast emptiness of Montana and Wyoming, I’d agree that you have a point. But that’s not the case.
Essentially the vote of two US citizens does not count equally if you count everyone.
If one lives in an area with more illegal immigrants, that US citizens votes foe him/her but also for the non voters in the area. This is not a ‘one person one vote’ situation and it’s a real concern if you believe in equal representation.
Ideally you’d have a citizenship question and you count only citizens for electoral college allocation and everyone for non electoral college matters. But that creates concerns of undercounting etc.
It's not just about the vote. Redistricting is one aspect of it, sure, but it's not the sole reason a census is done.
It's done primarily to predict tax revenues, predict infrastructure needs, predict growth patterns, support municipal planning, etc., all of which are necessities for projects that often span decades.
If you're concerned about the vote, deal with the challenge posed by the electoral college instead. The Census is used for too many other things to be manipulated for the sake of political interests by one party.
Are you mad that the census counts children too? They don't vote either. Would you favor the census skipping children? Should the census count people who don't regularly vote? How about felons denied the right to vote? People judged too mentally incompetent to vote? Just who all are you willing to not count?
This is a good point.
Should a district be penalized because their constituents chose to have more kids per family unit than others? Their voting power would go down in the interim, wouldn't it?
Thanks for raising the argument - it does a good job of showing why tying the census to voting power is meaningless.
And let’s be real - I find it pretty unlikely the constitution and 14th Amendment were written with massive amounts of illegal aliens being in the country in mind. Should we count tourists from other countries as well?
If you don’t count tourists, why would you count migrants who are supposedly going back to their home country? Maybe tourists who are here for 6 months would be analogous.
But, TBH, I don't really care much about their motives, because in a democracy we should be trying to get the most eligible people as possible to vote. Republicans are trying to prevent people from voting because they believe the more voting is expanded, the harder it is to get a majority of people to vote for them. Well, tough shit.
To see what has happened in Texas, with dropboxes limited to one-per-county, I feel like the previous argument against voter fraud has kind of gone out the window, and now it's just blatant - there is no rational reason the giant county that contains Houston should be limited to the same number of dropboxes as a rural county with orders of magnitude fewer people.
How this then translates into policy is an entirely different question, but essentially misrepresenting what should be objective reality for cheap political points is asking for trouble. A bit like closing your eyes: it doesn't make things go away.
It should also include the average amount of tourists (steady state) so that the presence of more people in an area get sufficient resources (to serve citizens and non-citizens alike).
An ulterior motive would be expressing support for a counting method with a statement about the technical superiority of the method, but really preferring it because of some bias inherent in it. The "ulterior" part comes from the motivation being different than what is publicly expressed.
I was skeptical about this so I looked it up. Nevada and Texas are the top 2 states on a per capita basis. I'd hardly call those liberal states.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauth...