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Ducey won’t appeal Arizona Census count

Posted 5/7/21

TEMPE — Gov. Doug Ducey said Thursday he won’t appeal the official census numbers for Arizona despite the financial hit they will mean to the state.

The decision comes despite the fact …

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Ducey won’t appeal Arizona Census count

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TEMPE — Gov. Doug Ducey said Thursday he won’t appeal the official census numbers for Arizona despite the financial hit they will mean to the state.

The decision comes despite the fact the official tally showed the widest negative disparity of any state between the estimates put out by the Census Bureau and what the agency said was actually counted. In fact, those official numbers even fell nearly 270,000 below what the agency had predicted would be the final number.

What all that means goes beyond the fact Arizona won’t add a 10th congressional seat in the 2022 election as had been projected.

The governor’s own census team had said that each 1% difference in the official count from the actual population translated to $62 million in lost federal aid. And with a 3.8% difference, that comes out to more than $235 million a year — or $2.35 billion over the course of a decade until the next official count.

It’s not just that the final census numbers differed from the agency’s own estimates. They also fell 143,085 short of the estimates drawn up by the state’s own demographer.
Accepting the census numbers as accurate runs contrary to what has been a key Gov. Ducey talking point for years: that Arizona was growing faster than pretty much anywhere else in the nation. And he credited that to what he said have been the state’s pro-business and anti-regulatory policies.

And now?

“Arizona continues to grow,” he said.
“Some other states grew faster,” the governor said. “You’ve got to have the numbers.”

In declaring the official results accurate, Gov. Ducey avoids questions about whether he bears some responsibility for the final count. That includes whether more people would have been counted had the state done more.

Gov. Ducey committed $1.8 million to get people to respond to the questionnaire. By contrast, the National Conference of State Legislatures reported early last year that Illinois already had an $84.5 million budget, with $15.5 million for the state of Washington and $20 million from New York, not counting another $40 million committed by New York City on census preparations.

“Spending doesn’t produce people,” the governor said. Anyway, he said, the percentage of people who responded even before the federal agency sent out people to follow up was “the best in two decades.”

Gov. Ducey also sidestepped questions of whether another of his actions may have affected the final numbers.

Last year the governor added his support to a proposal by then-President Donald Trump to include a citizenship question on the official census.

“There’s a number of different questions the federal government chooses to ask,” he told Capitol Media Services at the time. “I think to get a handle on who’s here, who’s a citizen and who’s not is a fair question.”

As it turned out, the agency never got to ask. But that left the question of whether the publicity about the issue, both nationally and statewide, depressed response rates among some families.

Any hesitancy would have made a significant dent, given some estimates put the number of undocumented residents in Arizona at about 235,000 — close to the difference between unofficial estimates and the final count.

That number of potentially uncounted undocumented residents also is significant for another reason: Arizona would have picked up that 10th congressional seat had its official count been close to 80,000 more.