Voters in California and Texas connected with a Democratic party want to intervene in a lawsuit brought by four Republican state attorneys general that seeks to illegally exclude persons in the United States from the statistics used to allocate congressional seats across states.
In a motion filed on Monday, the five voters claimed that the state attorneys general’s case would injure them by removing congressional representation and Electoral College votes from their respective states.
The lawsuit, filed more than a week ago by the Republican attorneys general of Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio, and West Virginia, aims to eliminate those who are in the country unlawfully or temporarily from the figures used to distribute congressional seats following each once-a-decade census.
The 14th Amendment says that “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for apportionment, which is the process of assigning congressional seats and Electoral College votes among states based on population.
The voters from California and Texas stated in their motion that the 14th Amendment made it “as clear as can be” that allocation should be based on the total number of residents.
During his first term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that would have excluded those living in the United States illegally from the 2020 census data used to allocate congressional seats. A second order required the collecting of citizenship data from administrative records. According to a Republican redistricting expert, creating congressional and legislative districts based on the citizen voting-age population rather than the overall population could benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
Trump issued the directives after the United States Supreme Court denied his earlier attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire.
Both Trump directives were revoked when President Joe Biden arrived at the White House in January 2021, prior to the release of the 2020 census numbers by the United States Census Bureau. Last Monday, at the start of his second term, Trump reversed Biden’s directive, indicating that his new administration may seek to amend the 2030 census.
