WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court could end up deciding when detailed data from last year’s census may get released, after a federal appeals court in Alabama on Tuesday tossed out the state’s effort to force the Biden administration to release redistricting figures early.
A three-judge panel threw out the suit filed by Alabama and GOP Rep. Robert B. Aderholt, a member of the state’s House delegation, saying they had not shown they were harmed by Census Bureau actions. The decision, handled by an 11th Circuit judge and two district judges, is immediately appealable to the Supreme Court.
The high court would have to make a decision quickly; the Census Bureau has said it will release redistricting data by mid-August.
Representatives for the Alabama Attorney General’s Office and the Justice Department could not be reached for comment late Tuesday afternoon.
Alabama sued the Biden administration in February after the Census Bureau announced a delayed release of detailed redistricting data, which originally was supposed to come as late as September. Over the course of litigating the case, as well as a separate one brought by Ohio, the agency said it would move up the release to mid-August.
During oral arguments in the Alabama case, the state said it was amenable to an August delivery. That factored into Tuesday’s decision, as the judges found the new deadline did not harm the state enough to warrant the lawsuit.
“The bureau has made clear the data will be available for use on August 16, 2021, a date that plaintiffs have acknowledged will allow them to complete redistricting without causing them cognizable injury,” the panel wrote.
The Census Bureau adopted the late delivery deadline after months of delays last year on its decennial head count due to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as various decisions by the Trump administration.
Alabama also challenged the agency’s new privacy protections for census participants, known as differential privacy. The state argued the Census Bureau adopted an overly broad reading of the federal privacy mandate and that changes from a new privacy algorithm would harm redistricting efforts.
The judges noted that plaintiffs cannot say whether the differential privacy policy has harmed them before the agency actually releases the numbers.
“It may very well be that the Individual Plaintiffs will return here once the final redistricting data are actually delivered to the states,” the decision said. “But we cannot know whether differential privacy will inflict the harm alleged by the Individual Plaintiffs until the Bureau releases a final set of redistricting data.”
Census Bureau officials said the agency adopted the new protections, which use an algorithm to alter participant data, to keep census responses private and individuals from being identified in the results. The agency finalized the settings for the algorithm earlier this month, amid criticism from minority advocates and demographic experts over its impact on the accuracy of data used to draw legislative boundaries and guide more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending.
Census officials have argued that the differential privacy system provides more protection than previously used methods, as well as more transparency. The agency eventually plans to publish the algorithm behind the differential privacy protections, allowing researchers to get a better idea of how much it changed the data.
