Democrats would not lose 20 House seats if unauthorized immigrants weren’t counted in the census

Every ten years, the United States conducts a census to count the population.

The results of that census determine how many representatives each state gets in Congress, and the combined number of representatives and senators determines how many electoral votes each state gets in the presidential race.

Since the census counts both citizens and noncitizens, some of our readers wanted to know whether people in the country illegally might be indirectly affecting elections.

VERIFY reader Lennard said he heard that if the census didn’t count unauthorized immigrants, Democrats would lose 20 seats in the House of Representatives, and therefore 20 electoral votes.

THE QUESTION

If the census didn’t count unauthorized immigrants, would Democrats lose 20 seats in the House and 20 electoral votes?

THE SOURCES

• U.S. Census Bureau
• Pew Research Center
• U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• U.S. Constitution

THE ANSWER

No, Democrats would not lose 20 House seats and electoral votes if unauthorized immigrants weren’t counted in the census.

WHAT WE FOUND

The process of allocating House seats based on states’ populations is called apportionment and it’s required by the Constitution. The current formula for apportionment was established by federal law in the 1940s.

To determine how the electoral map might change if people in the country illegally weren’t counted, VERIFY took state population data from the most recent census in 2020, subtracted the number of unauthorized immigrants in each state, and applied the formula to the new population figures.

There’s no official government count of the number of unauthorized immigrants in each state, so we used estimates from Pew Research Center, which are the numbers most widely cited by experts.

If people in the country illegally were not counted in the census, we found that California could lose one House seat, Texas could lose one, Ohio could gain one, and Michigan could gain one.

We wouldn’t know exactly how this could affect the balance of power in the House until those states drew up new district maps and held elections. But it’s clear Democrats wouldn’t lose 20 seats.

From an electoral college standpoint, using the 2020 election results, Biden would have lost an elector in California but gained one in Michigan, and Trump would have lost an elector in Texas but gained one in Ohio. That means omitting unauthorized immigrants from the census would not have had any impact on the most recent presidential election.