Probe: Contact between Trump adviser and gerrymandering guru

House Democrats investigating origins of a proposed citizenship question for 2020 Census said Tuesday y’ve found previously undisclosed communications between a Trump ministration viser and a redistricting guru who favored excluding ncitizens from population counts to help Republicans. Trump ministration viser Mark Neuman was in direct contact with redistricting expert Thomas Hofeller as Neuman drafted a letter to Census Bureau on behalf of Department of Justice, asking that citizenship question be ded, according to a memo released by House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

At time, Neuman was vising U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who anunced last year he was ding citizenship question to 2020 Census in response to Department of Justice’s need to help enforce Voting Rights Act. “Please make sure that this langu is correct,” Neuman wrote to Hofeller in an August 2017 text mess, ding that Hofeller’s business partner, Dale Oldham hn’t returned his calls, according to House memo. Hofeller responded, “Dale just re it, and says it is fine as written,” memo said.

Hofeller h written a 2015 study on potential partisan impact of basing Texas legislative districts on number of voting- citizens rar than total population. “A switch to use of citizen voting population as redistricting population base for redistricting would be vantous to Republicans and n-Hispanic Whites,” Hofeller said in study which was me public after his death last year. U.S. Supreme Court last June rejected Trump ministration’s efforts to d citizenship question, saying justification for question “seems to have been contrived.”

Opponents said having a citizenship question on questionnaire would have discourd immigrants and Hispanics from participating, to disvant of Democrats, in he count that takes place every 10 years. In a statement, U.S. Commerce Department cited preliminary results of a Census Bureau test that showed citizenship question for most part would have h little impact on participation overall. “Again, Oversight Democrats are proving that this is simply a PR stunt primarily intended to malign senior officials in Trump ministration,” statement said.

census helps determine distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending. It’s also used for calculating how many House members each state gets in apportionment process, and it’s used for redrawing state and local legislative boundaries in redistricting. Evidence uncovered by ongoing House investigation suggests Trump ministration wanted to d citizenship question months before Department of Justice me its request and that “may have been an unconstitutional effort to exclude immigrants for purposes of legislative redistricting and apportionment,” House memo said.