[woo49]

I agree. It would be much better if both sides were at least honest.

for example, the Democrats could say "we understand some electoral college votes will be indirectly allocated to illegal immigrants, we also understand that because liberal states have more illegal immigrants it will help the left more than the right, but that's the price to pay for counting every actual US citizen."

The republicans could say, 'we want to make sure only US citizens count in terms of votes, and we will lose some actual US citizens plus we will undercount illegal immigrants (which is useful in other, non voting related ways) in order to ensure that.'

Then we can have a conversation. The way this dialog is being had, with liberal statisticians making 'scientific arguments' and republicans attacking electoral integrity is just a mess.

[abathur]

I agree with the general thrust of what you're saying in terms of honesty, but I want to point out that it's not clear that the ground truth fits/supports this framing.

If you look at something like https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauth... and sort the list any way you want: There are several reliable D/R states with almost no undocumented immigrant population, and several D/R states with 3%+.

[Retric]

It’s something of a tossup if counting all immigrants directly helps Republicans or Democrats in term of house seats. That really depends on which states are near the breakpoint and so far we just don’t have that data, presumably the current administration is basing their choices on something we don’t know rather than ideology.

It might impact gerrymandering efforts, which gets even more complicated and again without a clear winner unless you have a preliminary version of the data to work with.

Honestly, I dislike what’s being done due to optics more than politics.