Cities in Georgia, across US appealing 2020 census count garner only small wins

For the U.S. cities and towns that have challenged their 2020 census population figures because they say residents were overlooked during the nation’s last head count, victories have been mostly small. But small turned out to be big for tiny Whiteville, Tennessee.

Of the dozen or so municipalities that have appealed and had the results made public by the U.S. Census Bureau, the biggest gain so far has been 1,958 residents in tiny Whiteville, which now has a revised population of 4,564 residents and could see a significant boost in the money it gets from the state and federal governments.

But even with just small increases of several hundred residents, cities like Milwaukee are taking what they can get. Wisconsin’s largest city recently gained more than 800 residents after it was discovered that inmates at one of the local jails were wrongly assigned to a neighboring city. That challenge was organized with other Wisconsin municipalities.