Our census, mandated by the United States Constitution and held every ten years since 1790, has tremendous importance and significance. It is far, far more important than a national headcount. The census sets the amount of federal assistance in some 130 different programs and state allocations as well. The Lycoming County commissioners have publicly emphasized several times that the county loses approximately $2,000 in state and federal funding annually for EACH PERSON who is not counted in the census.

But what gets most of the attention is how the census impacts our representation in government. By law, there are 435 members of the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress. Whatever it will be, the total population is divided by 435, and districts will be redesigned nationwide to comply with those population density parameters. The recent release of the census numbers showed that six states; Texas, Florida, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, and North Carolina, will be adding representative districts, and six others; California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, and our own state, Pennsylvania, will be losing a district.

But, some of the numbers did not add up quite right. Fred Keller, our local U.S. Congressman representing PA-12, serves on the Committee on Oversight and Reform. It is the main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. They have the authority to investigate the subjects within the committee’s legislative jurisdiction as well as “any matter” within the jurisdiction of the other standing House Committees.

In early May, I discovered that Congressman Keller signed a letter along with fifteen other members of that committee requiring Gina Raimondo, Secretary of the U.S. Dept of Commerce, the department responsible for the census, to explain what appears to be some possible fudging of the numbers. I sought out Congressman Keller’s office, and his press secretary responded that several concerns were addressed in the letter.

When the committee staff began asking questions to the Census Bureau on April 26th, they were referred to the White House. By statute, the Commerce Secretary is the one who relays apportionment results to the White House, not the other way around. More seriously, the actual apportionment results released on April 26th differed significantly from evaluation estimates released only months prior, with those differences appearing to benefit blue states.

The reason for questioning the final count against the projected numbers was because they should not have been off by so much. Going back to the 2010 Census, the final headcount in every state was within 0.4% of the original estimate, and 30 of them were within 0.2 percent. This census, however, had 19 states more than 1 percent off, seven were more than 2 percent off, New York more than 3.8 percent off, and New Jersey more than 4.5 percent off from the earlier projections. Adding these together, by a suspicious coincidence, the final 2020 census added 2.5 million “blue-state” residents and subtracted more than 500,000 “red-state” residents from the earlier projections.

Another anomaly that brings back the argument of the integrity of the 2020 election was the question of voting. According to the Census, the recorded number of people voting in 2020 was tallied at 154,628,000. The official results, however, place the number of actual ballots cast slightly over 158 million. That means that the number of ballots counted was nearly three and a half million MORE than the number of people who say they actually voted. This is quite unusual because they are generally very close. In 2008, for example, the bureau reported 131,100,000, while the official results showed 131,300,000 ballots cast, a 200,000 number difference.

This is why Congressman Keller and his colleagues seek answers to these discrepancies and question why House Democrats were previously very vocal in expressing their concern about the census being tampered with for political gain before Biden took office. Yet, since his administration took power, those calls for investigation have stopped. The Republican members of the Committee on Oversight and Reform Committee are confronting the Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to determine if there was any “political interference” in the final census numbers used to decide how many House members each state will get in the coming decade.

Join Congressman Keller’s fight on this very important issue of census integrity. Go to his website, https://keller.house.gov/ and sign up for his newsletter, and while you’re at it, send along an encouraging message. He is fighting for us.