Census 2020

As specified in Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution,

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according
to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State…

Apportionment divides the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the 50 states.    The number of seats in Congress, established in the Reapportionment Act of 1929, does not change, but the number of seats allocated to any one state can, based upon the results of the Census each ten years.  The number of seats each state has influences the state’s power in the daily deliberations of the Congress.

Every four years, the Electoral College selects the President and Vice President.  Each state has the same number of electors as it does Members in its Congressional delegation: one for each Member in the House of Representatives plus two Senators.

During the 2010 Census Illinois’s participation rate was 80.7% resulting in a population count of 12,830,632, making Illinois the 5th largest state in the nation.  Despite these impressive numbers, Illinois lost a seat in the House of Representatives in 2010, thereby losing influence on public policy throughout the decade and in the Electoral College.

The population of Illinois has decreased by about 159,700 people, or 1.2% of its population, since 2010, while other states in the southwest and west are growing in population.  Estimates from the consulting firm EDS and the Census Bureau indicate that Illinois is likely to lose a seat in Congress due to the changes in population distribution.  If the population that is in Illinois is not counted completely, that could result in the loss of an additional Congressional seat, reducing Illinois’s number of Representatives from 18 to 17 or even 16.

Counting for Dollars, a research program at George Washington University Institute for Public Policy provides evidence for the impact the Census results have in our communities.

Census results are used to allocate more than $800 billion of federal money each year to state and local governments through over 300 different programs.

The $55,855,815,000 Illinois received from federal programs in FY2017 were used to provide health care, basic nutrition for children and the elderly, student loans and Pell Grants, housing assistance , highway and transit construction. Illinois received $425,304,806 in FY2016 to support rural programs such as electrification loans/guarantees,  very low to  moderate income housing loans,  rural rental assistance, business and industry loans, water  and  waste disposal systems for rural communities, and the cooperative extension service.  Communities and individuals throughout Illinois benefit from these programs.

Impact of a possible undercount of Illinois’s population during the 2020 Census:  $953 per person missed, per year

Illinois will lose an estimated $953 per person, per year of federal dollars allocated to states for the 5 programs that use the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP).  Programs using the FMAP are Medicaid, State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Title IV-E Foster Care, Title IV-E Adoption Assistance.  These five programs allocated $281.1 billion in FY2015 among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The other 300+ census-guided federal grant programs mentioned above rely on population characteristics such as age and income, which are derived from the Census, not headcount.  Therefore, although an undercount will impact the allocation of dollars to those programs, the Counting for Dollars research project is not able to quantify that impact.