Why did Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census, approve adding a hotly contested citizenship question to 2020 census forms?
Ross has said the driving force is the need for more accurate citizenship data, which he wants to collect during the next once-a-decade headcount of every person in the country as required by the U.S. Constitution.
The question was requested this past December by the Justice Department, which says it needs data from the census to better enforce the Voting Rights Act’s provisions against racial discrimination. Since the law was enacted in 1965, the federal government has relied on estimates of the citizen population based on Census Bureau surveys involving a sample of U.S. households.
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