The Weaponized Census

So far, 2018 has been the time for passionate fights about strange things. Facebook quizzes, self-driving cars, expensive dinner tables, and porn stars have all become critical pieces of the political landscape. The weird has become the mundane, and even the most obscure and arcane pieces of political machinery have had their day as hot-button issues that could define the country’s future.

Add the methods section of the 2020 Census to that improbable list.

On Monday evening, the Commerce Department announced that it would make a to the next Census that the Trump administration has signaled for months: the addition of a question asking participants about their citizenship status. While citizenship is currently a field in a major interstitial supplemental survey to the Census, the last time it was asked to the entire United States population during the decennial main event was in 1950. But,, the Department of Justice in December to the Census Bureau asking for the question’s reinstatement, calling it “critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”