By Kallee Nielsen
Utah”s pursuit for a fourth congressional seat will end in the United States Supreme Court.
Utah”s case, led by Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, will contest the validity of the statistical methods used in the 2000 Census.
In August, a three-judge panel voted to dismiss the case but Utah Lead Attorney Thomas Lee said they feel they have a strong case to present before the nation”s highest court.
The state is arguing that the method of “hot deck imputation” used in the 2000 Census is statistical sampling and violates a 1999 Supreme Court ruling.
“The method of hot decking is to guess,” Lee said.
Hot decking is a standard procedure used by the Census Bureau to determine data that cannot be obtained by a head to head count.
The Census Bureau assumes the number of residents in a non-responsive household will match those of its” responsive neighbors, said Lara Wolfson, an expert witness for the state and an assistant professor the BYU statistics department.
“If [the Census] duplicates the data there are going to be incorrect estimations,” she said.
“This is not real data,” said Lee, a BYU law professor. “They”re not actually counting these people. They”re guessing that they exist and they”re also guessing as to the existence of households.”
Residents who were out of the country or vacationing were not officially counted in the 2000 Census.
The state said it fears Utah will be misrepresented in Congress due to phantom residents, bogus neighborhoods, and make-believe numbers created by hot decking, which the state believes gave Utah a lower population count.
“The longer we look, the more we are absolutely convinced that Utah was robbed of an additional voice in Congress,” Shurtleff said in June.
With a static 435-member United States Congress, Utah was 857 residents short from gaining a fourth seat. That seat was awarded to North Carolina, as the state”s 13th congressional seat.
Lee said the Supreme Court decision will impact Utah”s representation in congressional and presidential election for the next decade.
“We will do anything we can to make sure Utah gets its fourth congressional seat, Shurtleff said.
