Wednesday, June 3, 2015

"The Mysterious Number of American Citizens"

"Supreme Court justices assume we know how many Americans can vote. But we have no idea."
Many Americans believe that someone, somewhere in Washington, must be in charge of tracking who is and who isn’t a citizen of the United States. Apparently, so does the U.S. Supreme Court, which just accepted a voting rights case that turns on the government’s ability to count the number of citizens in each voting district. But despite all the talk these days about government and Big Data, the justices, like the rest of us, might be surprised to learn that the most basic information as to who is an American citizen cannot actually be found in any publicly available government data set — anywhere...

“What about the U.S. Census?” you might be wondering. It’s true that the census releases a data set that provides the building blocks of redistricting plans for Congress, state legislatures, city councils and school boards. But that data set counts just two things: the total number of people, and the number of people over the age of 18, in every community in the country. The data file has no information about which of those people are citizens and which are not. (read more)
Not even the much maligned, all knowing, intrusive NSA knows who is a citizen and who is not?

6 comments:

edutcher said...

Since that great defender of the Constitution (he was the one who wanted to pack off all the Japanese-Americans to internment camps) started this business, maybe it's a good time to junk just about everything his Court ever did (hint, hint).

I'm Full of Soup said...

There is very little the fed guvmint does well or correctly. They do almost nothing that would be considered important.

ricpic said...

Maybe the Supremos will decide to count a non-citizen as 3/5ths of a citizen in determining the numerical size of a congressional district. After all, there IS a precedent.

bagoh20 said...

We need to figure out how many voters there are, but we also need to decide how many votes each one gets, dead or alive. Then agree that Democrats can vote one extra time, because we still need to respect the cultural traditions of Democrats.

I'm Full of Soup said...

And what Bago said! [he has the unique ability to add a bot of humor to the sorry truth].

Methadras said...

We don't even know how many illegals we have, much less qualified voting citizens, but government sure wants to know your race, marital status, ethnicity, and a whole host of other demographic information.