Florida court tosses GOP suit attempting to influence elections by challenging U.S. census

A Florida court dismissed a lawsuit* Tuesday that challenged some of the U.S. Census Bureau’s methods for estimating the population, a critically important process that determines how many votes each state receives in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the electoral college during presidential elections. 

The case was part of a broader Republican effort to increase the power of GOP-controlled states by changing how the U.S. population is counted.

Two Young Republican groups filed the lawsuit in September, asking a federal court to order the bureau to “create a new 2020 Census report that does not use statistical methods” and prohibit those methods in the next census in 2030. They argued that the methods in question led to an undercount of the population in Florida that reduced the state’s electoral power. 

But the court concluded that the four-year statute of limitations to challenge the methods used in the 2020 census had run out by the time the lawsuit was filed. The case was dismissed without prejudice, and plaintiffs have 14 days to amend and refile their complaint.

Republicans are exploring other routes to change the mathematics of voting.

Last week, the office of Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) filed a similar lawsuit challenging census methods, calling it a “first in the nation” suit aimed at stopping the census from “unconstitutionally allowing illegal aliens to commandeer the path to The White House and compromise our elections.”

Missouri is asking a federal court to order the Census Bureau to exclude undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders from population counts and then recalculate how many congressional seats each state is given. It is also seeking an injunction blocking the bureau from including those groups in the 2030 census count.

“Foreign trespassers should not control the direction of this nation,” Hanaway said in a social media post announcing the lawsuit. 

In the complaint, Hanaway’s office argued Missouri would have an additional seat in Congress if the census population count included only U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. It went on to argue that changing the counting method would also give the state an additional electoral vote in presidential elections.

*Intervening defendants are represented in the lawsuit by the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.