A liberal California judge has banned the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census and said that the question is a threat to democracy and “counterproductive” to obtaining citizenship data about the public.
San Francisco judge Richard Seeborg said, “The record in this case has clearly established that including the citizenship question on the 2020 census is fundamentally counterproductive to the goal of obtaining accurate citizenship data about the public.”
He also claims that the citizenship question “threatens the very foundation of our democratic system” because it would not accurately count the number of immigrants and latinos–therefore potentially distorting the distribution of congressional seats.
The Trump Administration said that those who do not want to answer the citizenship question could leave it blank.
The Washington Times reports:
Citizenship questions have been asked before. Up until 1950, the question was part of the basic form all households got.
After that, the question was relegated to the “long form” that went to a smaller number of households, and it’s still to this day asked on the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which is a rolling version of the census long form.
But Judge Seeborg said it doesn’t matter what happened in the past, or what might work in the future. What matters is that in today’s environment people might refuse to answer.
