Really late. The pre-Covid decades were very much predictable in terms of census data releases. The apportionment data, pursuant to statute, would be delivered to the President and Congress by Dec. 31, and redistricting was delivered to the states on a rolling basis throughout March. States with early primaries in that year would get their data first. By April 1 every state would have all of the data needed to begin the redistricting process.
This decade, the census data timeline has been delayed and is riddled with uncertainty. The apportionment data was promised by the Census Bureau in January, then February, March, and now April. At present, the Bureau will not hazard a guess on when redistricting data will be available to states except to say that it won’t be before the end of July.
Legal Deadlines Loom in the States
Many state constitutions require new maps during the year after the census, many legislatures are currently in session, and redistricting commissions have formed – yet there is no census data to work with. This is causing lots of legal and political uncertainty among states, and there is no end in sight. The best estimates indicate that data could be available by late summer or early fall, but there is no definitive answer.
California and New Jersey have formally made rule changes to avoid much of the confusion. The former by court order and the latter by constitutional amendment, but many states are taking a wait-and-see approach. Luckily, some state statutes and constitutions peg redistricting deadlines to when the census data is received – alleviating the need to modify any deadline. However, 23 states in addition to California must redistrict before the end of 2021.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has proposed possible measures that states could take such as asking courts for relief, altering primary dates or even redistricting with alternate data. Using another dataset that compares to decennial census data would be difficult. Perhaps the closest comparable dataset outside of a state’s own census would be the survey data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). Unfortunately, that data does not give enough detail about precisely where individuals are located. One perhaps can make the argument that this would work as a “rough approximation” until the decennial data is available, but this is uncharted territory.
