By Ariana Baio

Copyright independent

Republican Senator Jim Banks is asking the Department of Commerce to review, and possibly re-do, the 2020 census, believing former President Joe Biden miscounted data to benefit Democrats – despite the fact that the census was conducted under President Donald Trump’s first administration.

In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, sent on Monday, Banks claims the Biden administration used a “shady privacy formula”, called differential privacy that “scrambled” data and allowed undocumented immigrants to respond to the survey.

“The 2020 Census was a fraud,” Banks wrote, claiming the results gave Democrats congressional seats and potential electoral votes.

But the decision to use differential privacy in the census and the collection of census data was completed under Trump’s first administration. The Biden administration only published the first data report in April 2021.

Bank’s X post soon generated attention from people who clarified that Trump was president during the 2020 census.

“Donald Trump was the President in 2020,” California Governor Gavin Newsom responded.

Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell responded, “I’m with Banks! We should find out who was president in 2020 and fire that guy!”

“‘Who was president in 2020?’ remains one of the great disputed questions of American politics,” Matthew Yglesias wrote.

Banks responded to several people, including Newsom, to clarify that he was referring to the first 2020 census report, which was “prepared and published” in 2021, after Biden was in office.

Banks, a Republican senator from Indiana, made headlines in April when he refused to apologize for telling a fired Health and Human Services employee they “probably deserved it.”

But the qualm Banks has with differential privacy was a decision made while Trump was president.

“The Biden administration, when they gathered all of the data from the 2020 census, they used this shady privacy formula to shield illegals in the 2020 census,” Banks told Steve Bannon’s War Room Monday.

Differential privacy is a framework that allows statistical information to be released without revealing the identity of those involved. Adding “noise,” or small, negligible numbers, to the dataset prevents people from deducing who may be involved.

In 2019, Dr. Ron Jarmin, the former acting census director, said they would employ this method in the census to protect privacy. Jarmin continued to serve as acting census director until 2022 and is currently the deputy director of the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Independent has asked Banks’s office for comment.

The Constitution requires the census to count “the whole number” of persons in each state, regardless of citizenship – which Republicans, including Banks and Trump, have taken issue with.

In 2019, Trump unsuccessfully attempted to require the 2020 census to include a question about a person’s citizenship status, but the Supreme Court struck it down. Recently, the president has pitched the idea of a new census that would exclude noncitizens.

The push appears to be an attempt to lower the population in large cities, often Democrat-run, that provide “sanctuary” for undocumented immigrants.

The results of the census determine a state’s redistricting as well as electoral college votes.

Banks’s concerns with the results of the 2020 census are not completely unfounded. The government’s post-census survey found that eight states, mainly Democratic, were overcounted while six states, mostly Republican, were undercounted.

A significant number of people were found to be left out of the census, such as people under 50 years old and Hispanics.

A 2022 report from the Brennan Center found that internal emails at the U.S. Census Bureau indicated officials at the bureau were experiencing more political pressure from the Trump administration to control census data collected.