On Monday, a federal district court in Alabama dismissed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Census Bureau’s practice of including the “whole number of persons in each state” in the census counts for apportionment. The state of Alabama had filed the challenge to block the inclusion of unlawful immigrants in the apportionment count, but the recently announced apportionment results played a role in the case dismissal.
According to Alabama, the Final “2020 Census Residence Criteria and Residence Situations Rule” promulgated by the U.S. Census Bureau on February 8, 2018, provides that foreign nationals living in the U.S. will be counted in the census and allocated to the state where their “usual residence” is located—regardless of whether they are legally present in the U.S. As a result, the congressional and electoral apportionment predicated on the 2020 census numbers will reallocate a congressional seat and an electoral vote from the State of Alabama to a state with a larger illegal alien population, this violates Section 2 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the constitutional principle of equal representation by robbing the people of the State of Alabama of their rightful share of political representation.
Alabama had been projected to lose one congressional seat after the 2020 census but the actual apportionment results released nearly a week ago revealed that it would keep its current seat total. Alabama agreed to dismiss the case based on this unexpected development.
