A new article exploring controversies in political representation and rights features analysis and commentary from Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge. In the Mother Jones article “Trump’s Stealth Plan to Preserve White Electoral Power,” journalist Ari Berman writes about Republican-led efforts to exclude children and non-citizens from consideration for redistricting and how “2021 could be the year Texas and other Republican-­controlled states upend the traditional way of counting who gets represented by state legislators.” 

He goes on to discuss the potential impact of such a change and cites the analysis by Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge, “The Threat to Representation for Children and Non-Citizens: An Analysis of the Potential Impact of Evenwel v. Abbott on Redistricting,” from Social Explorer's Webby Award-winning project.

Berman also quotes Beveridge on how the new system would dismantle heavily Latino districts and increase power in white communities.

“It’s a power grab,” Beveridge said. “If they were able to do this, they would take the country back in time.”

After the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, Trump announced an executive order to get citizenship information from other federal agencies. Beveridge also commented in the article about challenges that the Census Bureau would have in using these other data resources to track citizenship.

“I’m real dubious about it,” Beveridge said. “They haven’t done this ever. We’re talking two years from the release, and it hasn’t been tested at all. It’s like the citizenship question 2.0.”

Read more about voter suppression efforts, the Census and partisan efforts to change redistricting in the full article here.

Also, learn more about Social Explorer’s project on the Threat to Representation for Children and Non-Citizens here.