President Trump has worked relentlessly to sabotage the Census count, seeking partisan advantage by undercounting immigrants and others who live in blue states and cities.
The immediate risk to New Jersey is that we could be forced to use his bad numbers when we draw new legislative districts next year. That’s because the state Constitution spells out a timetable for this redistricting process that must be met, with or without accurate numbers.
To guard against that risk, Democrats have put a Constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would allow New Jersey to delay redistricting by two years if the Census numbers arrive late, which is a foregone conclusion in this pandemic year.
We urge voters to approve the amendment so that New Jersey has some breathing room to do the job right. The amendment would allow time for a potential Biden administration to fix the numbers. And it would allow time for court challenges of the bad numbers, no matter who is president.
This is not a slam-dunk, and there are painful trade-offs. Passing the amendment would leave the current political map, now a decade old, in place for another two years. That’s unfair to Republicans, since the current map clearly favors Democrats and needs an update. And it’s unfair to Asians and Latinos, whose combined population has grown by 400,000 since the last census. The amendment is opposed by several good-government groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
But if the amendment fails, and the Census provides bad numbers, the undercounted communities could lose out for five elections, since the next Census won’t come until 2030. Given the partisan nature of Trump’s efforts, and his hostility to immigrants, that could distort politics in New Jersey for a full decade.
“The argument for is that it’s better to put off fair representation for one cycle than lock in unfair representation for five cycles,” says Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University poll and an expert on redistricting. “Personally, I am concerned about the accuracy of the Census data.”
The amendment has flaws. It applies to every Census and could have been targeted at the 2020 Census alone, given the unique challenge presented by Trump and the pandemic. It would delay redistricting any time the Census data arrives later than Feb. 15, an early trigger that could force a two-year delay in redistricting when it’s not yet necessary. Repairing those flaws might require another amendment.
But right now, we face a Trump emergency. We have a president with no sense of fair play who has tried over and over to undermine the accuracy of this Census count. This amendment gives New Jersey the ability to block his mischief. Please vote “yes.”
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October 18, 2020 at 07:00PM
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To block Trump’s census sabotage, amend NJ’s Constitution | Editorial - NJ.com
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