The inclusion of aliens, legal or illegal, in the population used for apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives and for redistricting (i.e., drawing new boundary lines for congressional, state legislative, and local city council and county commission offices) unfairly dilutes the votes of U.S. citizens and distorts their representation and political power within legislative bodies.
States should start conducting their own censuses and use citizen-only population in all redistricting.
Only Congress can fix the apportionment problem, and both President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress already attempted to do that. Trump was unsuccessful in reinstating a citizen question on the 2020 Census form. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a strange 5-to-4 decision, held in Department of Commerce v. New York that while Trump had the constitutional and statutory authority to add a citizenship question, his administration had not given a sufficient “explanation” for doing so.
There wasn’t time after the decision to reengage before millions of census forms had to be printed, so no citizenship question was added. The new Trump administration may act again and be successful in adding a citizenship question to the 2030 census form. But if a Democrat administration is elected in 2028, it’s almost certain that the question will be dropped, given the wholesale opposition of liberals to obtaining any accurate information on the size and extent of the alien population in the country.
That’s because they want aliens included in apportionment and redistricting.
In 2024, the House of Representatives passed the Equal Representation Act on a party-line vote of 206 to 202, with all Democratic representatives voting against it. It would have added a citizenship question to the census and changed the apportionment formula for the House so it is based only on the citizen population of the U.S., not its total population.
To no one’s surprise, the House bill never got past then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, who obviously believe they benefit from such foreign interference in our elections.
Republicans who now control the House and Senate need to try to pass the Equal Representation Act again. But given how narrow the GOP margin is in the House, and the certainty that Democrats will try to filibuster it in the Senate, they may not succeed.
But while states can’t change apportionment, they can change their redistricting process. And they should stop relying solely on the federal census for the population data they use for redistricting by conducting their own censuses, as so many of them did early in our history.
They cannot rely either on the accuracy of the federal census or that the next census will obtain citizenship information, which is needed for many reasons, not just redistricting.
States should have grave doubts about the accuracy of the federal census. As I explained in a 2024 Heritage Legal Memorandum on state censuses, the Census Bureau admitted in 2022 that it had made grievous errors in the 2020 census. It undercounted the populations of Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, while at the same time overcounting the populations of Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah.
These errors were so significant in apportionment that some states did not receive additional congressional seats they should have received, and others retained seats they should have lost. Moreover, by including aliens in the apportionment formula, states such as California have congressional seats they are not entitled to, and other states, such as Louisiana and Virginia, have been cheated out of additional congressional representation.
The same distortion occurs in redistricting. By including aliens in the population used for determining district boundaries, states are diluting the votes of citizens. The citizen/alien population of congressional and state legislative districts varies widely. For example, in Florida’s 11th Congressional District, 81% of the adults are citizens, but in California’s 34th Congressional District in Los Angeles, only 41% of the adults are citizens eligible to vote.
Yet the Supreme Court said in two landmark decisions in 1964, Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders, that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment requires that the population of legislative districts be as nearly equal in population as possible to protect the votes of Americans.
Aliens have no right to participate in our democratic process. They cannot vote legally and they cannot engage in the financial support of any candidates for any office at the local, state, or federal level. They should also not be affecting or otherwise influencing the choosing of our representation by the citizens who are entitled to participate in the democratic process.
By their inclusion in redistricting, they are affecting and influencing that representation by diluting the votes of citizens. Districts that include aliens when boundary lines are being drawn are not equalizing the population of the citizens who live in those districts.
To change that, states should start conducting their own censuses, and they should include a citizenship question on the census as outlined in the model state census bill that The Heritage Foundation has developed, available here:
States should not include any question about the race or ethnicity of their residents either using artificial categories, such as “Hispanic” created by the federal government and liberal activist groups. Race should not be a factor in the redistricting process since it leads to balkanization and discrimination.
States should use only the citizen population data they obtain for all redistricting in their states, including congressional districts. In 2016, in another Supreme Court case, Evenwel v. Abbott, the court held that states were not required to use citizen population in redistricting, but very carefully avoided ruling on whether they could use citizen population for redistricting.
That leaves this issue wide-open for states to do the right thing; namely, protect their citizens by ensuring that they are properly and accurately counted and that their votes are not devalued and diluted by aliens being included in the redistricting process that affects their political representation in their city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, and the House of Representatives.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
