Antelope Valley Press

Why did Biden Census Bureau add 2.5 million more residents to count?

- Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWor­ks

There is something very fishy about the new 2020 Census Bureau data determinin­g which states picked up seats and which states lost seats.

Most all of the revisions to the original estimates have moved in one direction: Population gains were added to blue states, and population losses were subtracted from red states. The December revisions in population estimates under the Biden Census Bureau added some 2.5 million blue-state residents and subtracted more than 500,000 redstate residents. These population estimates determine how many electoral votes each state receives for presidenti­al elections and the number of congressio­nal seats in each state.

Is this a mere coincidenc­e? These population estimates determine how many electoral votes each state receives for presidenti­al elections and the number of congressio­nal seats in each state.

Remember, the House of Representa­tives is razor-thin today, with the Democrats sporting just a six-seat majority with five seats currently vacant. So, a switch in a handful of seats in 2022 elections could flip the House and take the gavel away from current Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. A shift of 3 million in population is the equivalent of four seats moving from Republican to Democrat.

The original projection­s for the Census reapportio­nment had New York losing two seats, Rhode Island losing a seat and Illinois perhaps losing two seats. Instead, New York and Illinois only lost one seat, and Rhode Island lost no seats. Meanwhile, Texas was expected to gain three seats, Florida two seats and Arizona one seat. Instead, Texas gained only two seats, Florida only one and Arizona none.

Was the Census Bureau count rigged? Was it manipulate­d by the Biden team to hand more seats to the Democrats and to get more money — federal spending is often allocated based on population — for the blue states?

The evidence is now only circumstan­tial, but when errors or revisions are almost all only in one direction, the alarm bells appropriat­ely go off.

Here are some of the strange outcomes in the Census revisions just released:

No. 1: New York — We’ve been tracking the annual population/ migration changes between states since the last census in 2010. Over the past decade, New York lost about 1.3 million residents on net to other states. (This does not include immigratio­n, births and deaths.) Still, this is a population loss that is the equivalent of two, maybe three, lost congressio­nal seats.

But the final numbers added approximat­ely 860,000. That’s roughly twice the population of Buffalo and Rochester — combined. This is the state that has lost by far the largest population over the past decade.

No. 2: Many deep-blue states had 2020 census numbers significan­tly revised upward from their December estimates: Connecticu­t, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachuse­tts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.

No. 3: Many red states had 2020 census numbers lower than their 2020 estimates: Arizona, North Carolina and South Carolina.

No. 4: Going back to the 2010 Census, the final head count in every state was within 0.4% of the original estimate, and 30 of them were within 0.2%. This time around, 19 states were more than 1% off, 7 were more than 2% off, NY was more than 3.8% off, and NJ was more than 4.5% off.

No. 5: Virtually every one of the large deviations from the estimates favored Democrats. Just five states in the 2020 census were within the same margin (0.41%) that all states were within from the 2010 census.

Maybe the 2010 estimates were abnormally accurate, or maybe the 2020 estimates were abnormally inaccurate.

The Census Bureau needs to tell Congress why these revisions under former President Barack Obama were so much larger than normal and so weighted in one direction: toward the blue states.

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