So he took the Voting Rights Act in order to flip it on citizenship, right? So I guess what did he do and what did that show about how civil servants can still kind of – mitigate the damage caused by bad faith actors.

Yeah.

So the thing to keep in mind is that political operatives, of which Hoffler was one of them, they look to optimize whatever is available to them.

And so one of the things that Hoffler was better at than his Dem counterparts is really understanding the census and how every piece of the census worked.

how things were counted, how the actual mechanisms worked, how redistrictors worked in each state.

He worked as a redistrictor for the Republican Party.

And so what he was really good at is figuring out how to optimize so that the Republicans could draw a district to maximize their possibility of winning as many seats in the House as possible.

And these are not people with master's degrees in questioning style.

What's the complex work that goes on So

geographies are super interesting, and that's where the census block as a concept comes.

So keep in mind that in the United States, and this is very special to the United States, we count everybody once and only once, right? That seems pretty obvious, but in the right location.

So what is the right location? The reason why we care about the right location is because in Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S.

Constitution, right, like at the beginning of the origin of this country, the constitutional conveners decided to invert a census.

So censuses up until then had been used by kings to conscript people, to tax people, and to do other really questionable stuff.

So the etymological root of census is the same as censorship, right? Like these are actually bad things.

And I wonder if you could talk about that moment and what's at stake there.

What can you tell us about that trajectory, that kind of 30-year trajectory that precedes the 2020 census? What is important for the listener to know?

Yeah.

So the thing that I'd first pull out that I think is important is that, you know, especially during the 1990 census, but really going into the 2000 census, the Census Bureau had gotten better and better at getting as much detail as they could get.

But they kept missing people.

It's called the undercount.

And there's especially a differential undercount, which is the idea that certain populations are notably undercounted compared to others.

And we tend to look at this in terms of, you know, Black and Latino populations who tend to be undercounted.

Here in New York, of course, we had a huge get out the census campaign that was uh led by uh julie menon uh who is now you know the speaker of the the city council i don't know but maybe just pick a couple of these personalities it could be wilbur ross it could be you know someone from civil society explain you know what you observed and maybe why it to some extent does kind of complicate the maybe partisan picture that we have

How does the census determine that? where somebody lives if they got a home state and then they got a college state where they're currently attending college.

Absolutely.

So the technical mechanism is called the residence rules, which is a long list of what are all the requirements of what do you do with all the exceptions everywhere.

And the interesting thing about the residence rules is that they actually root back to congressional decisions, trying to look at what is a usual place of abode, which is the language from 1790.

And so they were trying to think about what it meant for people who were serving in a military or people that were merchants and going different ways.

And so keep in mind that this has a weird long history.

So for those who might know Christian biblical texts, You might know that Mary and Joseph had to go to Nazareth in order to be counted because it wasn't about the usual place of abode, it was about where you were born.

When Joe Biden wins the election, how does that alter the 2020 census, the deadlines, the processes, all the things you're talking about?

have cory and dana here and i hope you're jazzed too or as we like to say around here hey get excited dana thank you so much for guest hosting with me can you tell the people a little bit about your work and uh you know what's this idea about jenga politics and where are you at with decline these days

Yeah.

No, it's such an honor to be here with two dear friends who I'm very glad to spend the evening with.

You know, I ended up studying the census in the weirdest way possible.

I didn't even know what really how the census worked or what was going on.

And then, you know, a series of accidental moments ended up with me talking to a bunch of government officials and saying, hey, there's this big AI fight happening.

And I really want to understand what make data legitimate.

that's

Let's jump to what is the difference between an online community and a social network?

Right, so there's a lot of different social practices, right, from the origins of the web.

But what starts to emerge, you know, you've got blogging and people are actually creating their own little pages in that world.

And out of that, you also are at the same time starting to see online dating sites, right? These are happening around parallel.

The thing about an online dating site is that you would create a profile of yourself, right? And you would sit there and market yourself, you know, in the hopes that you would find somebody of interest to you.

And so here we are, the dot-com crash happens, and the only thing that's really making money is these online dating sites.

And so people start asking questions of, like, what's a better way to do an online dating site? And this is where you start to see old ideas start to merge together into one.

As, this is from an audience member, as a teenager who found a community via BBSs and forums without worries about safety, how do parents let their kids find that same freedom and community now?