3 July 2019 — 1205 mdt

Updated, 2235 mdt

No citizenship Census question probably means
Montana less likely to get second U.S. House seat

Trump does 180°, causes chaos. Late this afternoon (while I was shopping for the holiday) President Trump tweeted his intention to find a way to include the citizenship question on the Census form, the Supreme Court’s decision notwithstanding. I’m disgusted and outraged, but not surprised. And it would not surprise me were he to order the forms printed with the citizenship question in defiance of the courts, which may not look kindly on his ever changing rationales for including the question. See Linda Greenhouse’s oped in today’s New York Times, and Rick Hasen’s at the Election Law Blog.

Original post. There will be no citizenship question on the 2020 Census form. That’s good for the nation, as fewer non-citizens will avoid replying to the form out of fear they could be deported or harassed legally. But counting everyone could reduce the probability that Montana will regain the second seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that it lost after the 1990 Census.

By various accounts, the citizenship question could have produced a hispanic-latino undercount of nine or so million, mostly in states such as California, Texas, and Florida. It would not have produced a significant undercount in Montana, which would gain a slightly larger share of the nation’s population. That larger share, coming at the expense of other parts of the nation, might have been enough to provide Montana a second seat in the U.S. House under the reapportionment of the current 435 seats.

Election Data Services has published online analyses of how the U.S. House could be reapportioned.

A second, and in my opinion, better, way to equip Montana with two seats in the U.S. House is enlarging the House, whose size was last set after the 1910 Census, from 435 to approximately 700 members. The New York Times’ America Needs a Bigger House illustrates how this might be done.

Note to those who think that 435 is set in constitutional stone. It isn’t. The House’s upper and lower bounds are set by Article I, Section 2.3, of the Constitution.

That establishes the lower bound at 50 members, and the upper bound at 11,066 members (the Census projects a U.S. population of 332 million in 2020).

How might Montana be divided into two congressional districts? The NY Times has a weird solution. Here’s my quick and dirty solution, based on population estimates for 1 July 2018. I suspect this is very close to what would be adopted if Montana gets a second seat. Note that Bozeman would be in the eastern district.

Montana can improve its odds of obtaining a second seat by (a) counting everyone who appears to be alive, and everyone who appears not to be permanently dead, and (b) procreating like crazy.