Stella's Place

Very interesting. I had heard about the overcounts in blue states and undercounts in red states. This explains how it was done. It’s technical, but boils down to the fact that one bureaucrat made changes to the way the counts were done in such a way that they couldn’t be detected or challenged. And the counts weren’t really counts.

The man responsible for this,  John M. Abowd, joined the Census Bureau in 2016, and served until 2022. In my opinion, he is one of the bureaucrats who torpedoed the first Trump administration, and did tremendous damage. Although he is no longer with the Census Bureau, he still has fingers in the government pie. According to Wikipedia:

Abowd helped to found and continues to provide scientific leadership for the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program, which integrates censuses, demographic surveys, economic surveys, and administrative data to produce research and public-use data.

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NOTE: All bolded text was done by me.

The 2020 census was marketed as an “actual enumeration,” a neutral count of people for apportionment and funding. It was not. The same official who helped block a basic citizenship question in 2018, John M. Abowd, then the Census Bureau’s Chief Scientist, pushed through a new, opaque methodology in 2020 called differential privacy. The new system deliberately injected mathematical noise into every block count in America, turning the census from a headcount into a model with knobs. The knob that mattered most was a single parameter, epsilon, a secrecy shroud known only to a small inner circle. Abowd argued that a single added question about citizenship posed an intolerable risk to data quality because there was, he said, not enough time to test it. Then he rushed an untested algorithm that altered every count in every neighborhood. The irony is so sharp it cuts: the man who warned that one question might distort the census approved a method that guaranteed distortion.

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