Retirees and students in Florida are seeking to defend 2020 census results against a GOP challenge

By MIKE SCHNEIDER ORLANDO Fla AP Two Florida university students and an advocacy group for retirees are asking a federal judge to let them intervene in a lawsuit filed by young Republican groups challenging the census results saying they worry that the Trump administration won t vigorously defend the matter Related Articles North Korea says it test-fired cruise missiles ahead of Trump s visit to South Korea Democrats force a Senate vote to block Trump s tariffs on Brazil Man deported to Laos despite court ordering blocking his removal attorneys say Trump administration moves to overrule state laws protecting credit reports from anatomical debt Cancer doesn t care Citizen lobbyists unite to push past Washington s ugly politics The Trump administration has attacked the census results instead of defending the head count the Alliance for Retired Americans and the two University of Central Florida students wrote Tuesday in their motion to intervene They mentioned they are concerned that the Republican administration and the young Republican groups could reach a settlement that would alter census numbers and undercount people in nursing homes and college dorms The numbers gathered from the once-a-decade head count are used to determine how a great number of congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets They also guide the distribution of trillion in annual federal spending But the census numbers have come under attack this year from Republicans as President Donald Trump has been pressuring Republican-led state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts to benefit the GOP ahead of next year s midterm elections Revised census numbers from a productive lawsuit could be used in redistricting efforts In an August social media post Trump instructed the Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the United States illegally The th Amendment however says that the whole number of persons in each state are to be counted and the Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody residing in the U S regardless of legal status Federal courts have repeatedly supported that interpretation Concerns that the Republican administration wouldn t vigorously defend the count were raised by census and redistricting experts when the young Republican groups sued in federal court in Tampa in September The Commerce Department you know might just throw up their hands and say We agree with the plaintiffs mentioned Jeffrey Wice a New York Law School professor The lawsuit by the University of South Florida College Republicans and the Pinellas County Young Republicans challenges two methods used during the census differential privacy and imputation for group quarters which include college dorms nursing homes and other places where people live together under one roof Differential privacy adds intentional errors to the evidence to obscure the identity of any given participant in the census while still providing statistically valid information Imputation is a process of using other information to fill in details about people when census-takers can t reach anyone at a particular address Although the census numbers were circulated during the first months of Democratic President Joe Biden s administration the execution and final planning for the head count including the decision to use the statistical methods took place during Trump s first term The census faced unprecedented obstacles from the COVID- pandemic hurricanes and wildfires social unrest and efforts by the Trump administration to end the count early Group quarters such as college dorms and nursing homes were especially challenging because campuses were closed and care facilities restricted access in an effort to halt the spread of COVID- In the Florida lawsuit three federal judges have been designated to hear arguments in the incident Two of the judges were nominated by Republican presidents George H W Bush and Trump and the third was nominated by President Barack Obama a Democrat Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky mikeysid bsky social