News Clips

Common Cause, which first obtained the hard drives, said the revelations on them were a wake-up call to supporters of the American system. “Now that the plan has been revealed, it’s important for all of us — the courts, leaders and the people — to stand up for a democracy that incudes every voice,” said Kathay Feng, the group’s national redistricting director.

“If we miss our opportunity right now, we have to wait another decade to fix the problems,” said Jay Young, executive director of Common Cause Illinois, a Chicago-based nonprofit that promotes government reform. “Some of those folks are going to disappear into the shadows.”

“For every person we miss, every community we undercount, and all the groups we ignore, that will have a tremendous impact on the federal program funding, critical data for business owners, and building an improved Pennsylvania,” Micah Sims, a 2020 Census Complete Count commissioner and executive director of the good-government group Common Cause Pennsylvania, said in a statement Monday.

“The tragedy of it all is that the communities that are the hardest to count are the ones that are yearning to be seen by their government,” said Georgia Logothetis, assistant director of the nonprofit group Common Cause Illinois, which works on democracy, voting rights and gerrymandering issues. "We’re talking children, people living below the poverty line, minorities and immigrants,” Logothetis added. “For every 1% of people that were not counted in the last census, Illinois lost $122 million in health and human services funding.” Illinois could also have less representation and political power, as the state stands to lose one or two congressional seats if under-counted in next year’s census. “This is a true chance for every single person to be counted,” Logothetis said. “In the eyes of the government, if you don’t respond to the census, you don’t exist.”

"The citizenship question is a bald-faced attempt to racially rig the census, undercount communities of color and undermine fair representation which our democracy relies upon," said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan public interest group.

The Trump Administration is playing politics with Census 2020. That is the exact reason why a federal judge in New York has now delivered a major blow to Trump’s war on immigrants. In the first of seven pending challenges to the proposed citizenship question on the 2020 Census form, Judge Jesse Furman today ruled to stop the administration’s plans to add a citizenship question in their tracts. Immigration advocates and even scientists within the Census Bureau say that the question would cause more immigrants — both legal and illegal — to refuse to take part in the census. The fear among these communities is that immigration and customs enforcement agents would use the responses to track people down, leading to increased family separations and deportations.