Sixteen states are supporting Alabama in a lawsuit it filed against the U.S. Census Bureau, challenging the legality of a novel statistical method that the bureau is using for the 2020 census.
The states filed a brief Monday in support of the Alabama suit, brought on March 10, which asked a judge to stop the bureau from using “differential privacy” as a means of protecting people’s data. The method will harm the state by generating inaccurate data, Alabama alleged in its complaint.
Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia signed onto the brief in support of Alabama’s challenge to differential privacy.
“Because differential privacy creates false information — by design — it prevents the states from accessing municipal-level information crucial to performing this essential government functions,” the states’ brief read. “And the distorting impact of differential privacy will likely fall hardest on some of the most vulnerable populations — rural areas and minority racial groups.”
CENSUS BUREAU: HOMESCHOOLING MORE THAN DOUBLED IN 2020, HIGHER IN SOME REGIONS
Most of the states supporting the suit, including Alabama, have Republican attorneys general, though Maine and New Mexico have Democratic attorneys general.
The Alabama suit, which the state filed and Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt as well as two private citizens signed, argued the plaintiffs “and others across the State face the very real risk that their voting power will be diluted when the Bureau purposefully misreports the number of people living in different areas of the State.”
Differential privacy, the data protection method, has not been used in previous censuses.
The National Conference of State Legislatures described its function by saying, “With differential privacy, the bureau has stated that the total population in each state will be ‘as enumerated,’ but that all other levels of geography — including congressional districts down to townships and census blocks — could have some variance from the raw data. This is referred to by the Census Bureau as ‘injecting noise’ into the data. No ‘noise’ would be injected into the state total population, but in smaller geographic units, ‘noise’ can be expected.”
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, whose department oversees the census, responded to a question about differential privacy in an April 7 briefing at the White House, saying, “Today, the way quantum computing and computing is such that we — there can be privacy hacks today that weren’t technologically available 10 years ago.”
Raimondo continued, “So, in order for us to keep up with that and protect people’s privacy, we have to implement new techniques, and this is one of those new techniques. So, yes, I think it’s justified.”
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Alabama’s March 10 complaint challenges the bureau for committing to deliver redistricting data to states by the end of September, past the legal deadline of March 31.
