Hacker News Reader

Comment by stymaar | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain me why the Heritage foundation targeted these statistical techniques? What's the political motive behind it?

View on HN

Probably related to things like "The Nazis utilized data from routine censuses, tax returns, and municipal police registrations. In Germany, and in occupied countries like the Netherlands, this information was systematically organized. In some instances, IBM technology (via Dehomag punch card machines) was used to tabulate and sort census data to identify individuals of Jewish descent."

The 2020 Census had a number of issues and many of them ended up giving the Democrats more seats in the House than they should have. Oh, and the Census results were due at the White House in December 2016, but somehow they didn't reach the WH until January 21, 2017.

Was Differential Privacy specifically involved? I don't think so, but I think it's being lumped into the mix and being blamed for the other issues.

No disclosure avoidance was applied to the state-level population counts used for congressional apportionment (i.e. how house seats are divvied up). There are plenty of valid critiques of the 2020 Census disclosure avoidance systems, but the Rs who claim that DP was used to manipulate state population counts to give Democrats more seats either have no idea what they're talking about or are being malicious.

Also... the first census results typically come out in the same year, e.g. December 2020, not 2016? More detailed demographer data take a bit longer. COVID was really the cause for delayed releases.

The Rs are just confused. The manipulation happened but they didn't need DP to do it.

As I said, it wasn't the disclosure avoidance that generated the most discrepancies. It was other forms of adjustments.

> The 2020 Census had a number of issues and many of them ended up giving the Democrats more seats in the House than they should have.

Do you have any source on that. For a census issue to have an actual impact in an election outcome, it must either be:

- a lucky issue (flipping a very close race from one side to the other)

- a very big issue

Both can happen occasionally, but I have a hard time imagining “many of them” occurring in the same election.

I believe a few states would have fewer seats in Congress if it weren't for some last minute adjustments. It wasn't the actual election. It was the allocation of seats to each state that had the biggest effect.

Here's an example: https://x.com/WadeMiller/status/1985183761957372286

empower big corporations, and blow open statistical protections to allow for 1) better agit-prop efforts, to allow for more easy chasing of minorities they don't like, and 3) to target elections

Reply on news.ycombinator.com