With gerrymandering of election districts in the news, especially as Texas Democrats have fled the state to avoid a vote to create new Congressional boundaries, attention has focused on the role of the U.S. Census and how population numbers affect representation in Washington.
At the heart of the controversy is a pattern: Republican-majority states with strong GOP voting bases are consistently shortchanged, while Democrat-run states, such as New York, and those without a single Republican in Congress, manage to maximize their representation and influence. The result, critics say, is a built-in political advantage for blue states that undermines fair representation and tilts both the Electoral College and Congress to the left.
Wade Miller, executive director of the Center for Renewing America, argues the manipulation begins with the data itself. “Texas alone was undercounted by 560,000 people,” Miller said, citing figures the Census Bureau has publicly acknowledged. “A whole bunch of blue states were massively overcounted. Almost all of the errors went to the benefit of Democrats and to the detriment of Republicans.”
According to Miller, these disparities aren’t just statistical accidents. They’re the product of deliberate bureaucratic changes made during the Obama administration, including the use of an opaque process known as “differential privacy.” This algorithm, whose workings are kept secret even from most federal agencies, scrambles population data before it’s sent to the states. While officials say it protects privacy, Miller believes it distorts political representation. “Differential privacy can move the population around in an undetermined amount. It could be a 2% variance, it could be 40%. We actually don’t know—and the states don’t know—because the Census Bureau won’t disclose it.”
The implications are far-reaching. By counting illegal immigrants for apportionment purposes and obscuring their distribution, Miller says, the census inflates the representation of large Democrat-controlled cities while diminishing the influence of rural red districts. “Voting power for Congress has been disproportionately moved to these cities… and it’s depriving rural communities of their electoral power,” he said. “Red districts are way underrepresented in the current congressional maps.”
Miller points to Minnesota’s razor-thin gain of an additional electoral vote—by just 26 people—as “nakedly fraudulent.” He says similar patterns nationwide shifted representation and federal funding away from Republican states. “Given the totality of the circumstances here, we should assume something nefarious was done. If that is the case, people should be held responsible.”
President Trump recently floated the idea of republishing the 2020 census with corrected numbers. Miller says this is both constitutional and necessary. “A republishing of the 2020 census, which is completely legal despite what the left will try to say, is inherently justified by every means, just based on the sheer amount of miscounts, overcounts, undercounts, the corruption of differential privacy, the counting of illegals… none of this should be permissible.”
Beyond political representation, Miller notes that flawed census data also affects billions in federal grants and aid distribution. Cities and states that were undercounted—often Republican strongholds—have been shortchanged for years. “Municipalities all over the country could sue the federal government for not being paid as much as they could because the census undercounted them,” he said.
For Miller, fixing the problem is urgent. “It’s time for us to play hardball,” he said. “That means redoing the census, republishing the census, and making sure the 2030 count is fully corrected.” Without such changes, he warns, the political imbalance between red and blue America will only deepen—baked into the very numbers meant to represent the truth.