By Hansi Lo Wang
The U.S. Census Bureau has stopped working on a Trump administration-initiated project to produce citizenship data that could have politically benefited Republicans when voting districts are redrawn.
Citing President Biden’s executive order that revoked President Donald Trump’s directive for federal agencies to share their citizenship records, the bureau updated its website Friday with a statement that says its work on anonymized data about the U.S. citizenship status of every adult living in the country has been “suspended indefinitely.”
This change means that states will likely not get access to the citizenship data needed to carry out a radically different way of remaking political maps that determine the areas lawmakers represent. A GOP strategist had concluded that using block-level citizen voting age population, or CVAP, data for redistricting “would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/959609263/biden-administration-tables-trumps-citizenship-data-request-for-redistricting?fbclid=IwAR2-U1ORAFikrWKDhByer7DqKLjUTvpCYGCyrvTUHiPdjv75mq6LcVsvoC0