All the errors go in the same direction.
Last year, on these pages, the two of us raised the red flag on erroneous counts of state populations in the 2020 decennial Census. We noted that the headcount for New York, Rhode Island and other blue states appeared way too high given the annual population estimates from 2011 to 2019. It also appeared highly likely that red states like Florida, Tennessee and Texas had dramatic population undercounts.
When we first noted these anomalies, few believed that the Census numbers were this inaccurate.
Little more than a year later, the Census Bureau’s own data proves what we suspected from the beginning: More than a quarter of the states’ populations were miscounted and blue states were favored at the expense of red states to the tune of almost 2 million people.[…]
The result of this muck up is red states effectively lost at least three seats in Congress while blue states effectively gained them. With a narrowly divided House of Representatives, a six-seat swing is not to be dismissed out of hand. Furthermore, those congressional seats also mean electoral college votes in presidential elections. A more accurate census count would have increased the electoral votes from Florida and Texas in an era when narrow victories are becoming more common.
