alt.hn

6/13/2026 at 1:54:56 PM

Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

 https://desfontain.es/blog/banning-noise.html

by nl

6/13/2026 at 4:53:28 PM

I "enumerated" for the last census. Trust in my community was already not high* and I had lots of interesting encounters. I really believed the rather invasive data I was collecting with a friendly face would be used and handled responsibly. I feel for the poor souls that'll sign up to go door to door for 2030 now that the firewalls against weaponizing and monetizing all of our sensitive government data has been torn down, and even more for those that will volunteer information that can hurt them.

The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality. I've grown very jaded now seeing all the things taken for granted in this country and lost or degraded recently with a whimper.

*: To be fair, they sent me specifically to places that didn't respond, so I was naturally led to believe that everyone in my region hated the government, ignored bizzarrely threatening fliers, or had recently moved and had no knowledge of the inhabitants (if any) during the census period.

by kajman

6/13/2026 at 10:15:20 PM

> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality.

Even without considering the Census data products alone, Census demographic data underlies virtually all extrapolation from other survey research. Everything from national opinion surveys based on tens of thousands of respondents, to small community surveys. A Census product with the most diverse participation pays off almost infinitely for America. It benefits everyone from national newspapers to rural counties.

If the smallest communities lose what little trust remains in the privacy of the Census, they have the most to lose in all of these ways.

by nxobject

6/14/2026 at 2:58:55 AM

[dead]

by nandomrumber

6/13/2026 at 11:54:39 PM

[flagged]

by estearum

6/14/2026 at 12:16:14 AM

We have a screwworm infestation now because the Idiot In Chief sawthe previous control method had transgenic flies.

by inigyou

6/13/2026 at 7:24:08 PM

I did similar and you summarized the feelings well. It's really sad and hard to rebuild that trust

And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.

by windthrown

6/13/2026 at 9:54:54 PM

>And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.

The same party that promotes distrust in the government (that is justified by the abuse the same party does when in power).

Amazing, innit.

by alterom

6/14/2026 at 10:57:40 AM

> The same party that promotes distrust in the government (that is justified by the abuse the same party does when in power).

Perhaps because they know how corrupt they, themselves, are, they assume everyone else is the same way:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror

Perhaps the possibility that others are more altruistic does not enter the realm of possibility in their minds.

by throw0101a

6/13/2026 at 10:48:51 PM

The worse things get, the better they do. It's an insidious, vicious cycle.

by specialist

6/14/2026 at 7:25:31 AM

Iran, Haiti, Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Argentina have been at the "worse and worse" stages for decades and there is no "better" in sight.

by sofixa

6/14/2026 at 8:50:45 AM

> Iran, Haiti, Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Argentina have been at the "worse and worse" stages for decades and there is no "better" in sight.

Unless I’m completely misunderstanding things, it’s "better for the party". Our new Nazi party in Germany (AfD) even said something like that openly.

by Semaphor

6/14/2026 at 10:44:07 AM

>Russia ... have been at the "worse and worse" stages for decades and there is no "better" in sight

What do you mean? In the last 25 years life expectancy in Russia has risen by almost 10 years

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locat...

by drysine

6/14/2026 at 10:47:56 AM

The numbers since 2022 are to be taken with a bucket of salt.

And it's undeniable that the whole country is falling backwards - the economy is in tatters with high inflation, high interest rates , severe economic and kinetic damage to the main revenue generating activities (export of oil, gas, raw materials, military equipment), a poorly hidden ballooning debt crisis. And worst of all, a leader who cannot admit defeat so can't get the country out of the quagmire. So things will get a whole lot worse before there's any chance of them getting better.

by sofixa

6/14/2026 at 2:33:53 AM

No, this isn't a natural law of the universe. Sometimes thing get worse and then stay bad for a long, long time. We happen to exist in a relatively stable, prosperous period. We have used that prosperity to build a system that is more complex and brittle than any time in the history of the species. It won't be pretty when we reach the inevitable crisis.

The people in charge have never seen suffering and don't understand the essential role they have in preventing it. Instead they're disassembling the plane for parts while we hurtle toward the ground.

by idiotsecant

6/13/2026 at 10:33:10 PM

The premise of the Republican party for half a century now has been: "The government can't do anything right, and if you elect us we'll prove it!"

by clipsy

6/14/2026 at 12:46:29 AM

And it's something of a coin flip whether people prefer that philosophy to the other mob. Trump has made it to a seconds term and is talking about a third because of the stunning policy failures of the US government over the last 50 years.

by roenxi

6/14/2026 at 1:05:30 AM

Were you alive in 2024?

Trump won by <1% against an incumbent in a time that incumbents lost by >10%.

It's absolutely not that people like Trump, it's just that democrats are inept. Literally all democrats had to do was run somebody that didn't have a record of losing primaries.

by lesuorac

6/14/2026 at 1:52:16 AM

... or spend four years dancing around the idea of imprisoning a man who did quite a few things that should have earned him a prison sentence.

New York state's judiciary is spineless.

by lenerdenator

6/14/2026 at 1:40:12 AM

They're not legislatively inept, it's simply that viscerally, the electorate knows both mobs are guilty of the same representational transgressions. The GOP was always the party of big biz, while the dems were fronting as the hoi poloi's party, and everyone kinda figured that out as Trump played that irony and the anger behind it, masterfully.

How do you get out from behind that, is what renders them inept.

by anjel

6/14/2026 at 2:45:34 AM

The mob has been convinced of these things. If nothing else, Trump is a master of convincing gullible, desperate people that when he lights the town on fire, only the people they don't like will get burned.

The Democrats did fail, but it's not a both sides situation. They failed to vigorously engage in a simple and honest way with the fact that their opponent is a conman and a crook.

by idiotsecant

6/14/2026 at 2:41:06 AM

I think the big difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that the R-electorate votes for R-candidates because they want what the R-candidates are promising, while the D-electorare votes for D-candidates because they don't want what the R-candidates candidates are promising.

It's one of the reasons why "both sides" arguments are so frustrating. You can find R-voters who will defend Trump all day, in equal numbers to D-voters who will criticize Biden/Harris. You can see it in the number of R-voters you encounter online who think it's a "pwn" to bring up Clinton going to Epstein's Island, while D-voters respond, "yeah, and? Lock him up, too." We don't want these people who lie to us and glad hand for corporations, but it's marginally better than the alternative.

by moron4hire

6/14/2026 at 2:42:26 AM

Trump came to power because too many people have forgotten what kind of man it takes to tear it all down. No more, no less. It's like a clock.

One generation bleeds and dies on a battlefield somewhere so that eventually a few generations later their ancestors can make the same conditions arise again.

by idiotsecant

6/14/2026 at 1:31:37 AM

He's arguably in worse shape than FDR in his last term. I've come around to seeing such talk as yet another clever and effective bum rush to stave off hisgetting written off as the lame duck he actually is.

Think what you want about him, he is if nothing else, a manipulative genius, so it tracks.

by anjel

6/13/2026 at 11:28:57 PM

Your comment brought the song lyrics from Murder - Sepultura:

  ...
  Same hand that builds, destroys
  Same hand that relieves, betrays
  Same hand that seeds, burns
  Same peace that exists, here lies
  ...
  Same religion that saves, damns you!
I got no comment on the essence of your comment, but (in your implied meaning), the very last of the song was matching what you wrote.

by HenryBemis

6/13/2026 at 10:10:43 PM

[flagged]

by smaudet

6/14/2026 at 3:00:20 AM

You should never trust a politician, especially one that claims to be on/in the left.

These two statements are equally as vacuous.

by nandomrumber

6/14/2026 at 5:37:09 AM

You misunderstood, the meaning was roughly "one who claims his actions to be virtuous".

by fc417fc802

6/14/2026 at 5:30:28 AM

No, the first one is true. It's the copycat comment that is vacuous and doesn't even make any sense -- "in the right" has a clear meaning, "in the left" is nonsense.

by jibal

6/14/2026 at 7:01:04 AM

[dead]

by nandomrumber

6/14/2026 at 6:19:44 AM

You're playing party politics. That's the risk you take: that the party has goals beyond your (dareisay naive) utopian ideals for civic engagement.

Parties are not universally evil, when I malign them in this way it is in full acknowlegment that organization is the nearly singular path to "effect on target" as regards society-scale politics. What I mean is the party per se becomes a superorganism that has always as its first priority self-preservation (a la homeostasis) and it is very worth remembering this when subsuming oneself into their structure.

by uoaei

6/14/2026 at 12:14:21 AM

The real decline started after Edward Snowden and all the information that came out about the NSA. It really sparked distrust in the government. Trying to get people to respond to surveys was already hard, why would those general people believe the Census Bureau is actually keeping their data safe? Doesn’t matter when it comes to laws and the constitution, if you work for an Agency. You are the government. Response rates keep going down, now we have attacks from the President on statistics about the economy. I’m a little cynical and I just assume they will continue to shrink the statistical agencies and make the statistics more useless (which is what this recent policy change does), and they will shift to the private industry. Even though the private industry cannot do the work in the Field that the government does.

by spaceisballer

6/14/2026 at 12:34:14 AM

> The real decline started after Edward Snowden and all the information that came out about the NSA. It really sparked distrust in the government.

Do you have evidence of this? Because I'd bet 90% Americans have no idea who Edward Snowden even is.

by js2

6/14/2026 at 1:24:56 AM

I’ll take the under on that bet any day. Maybe around 75% is where I would feel more confident. 25% of a country is more than enough to meaningfully shift perception.

by iwontberude

6/14/2026 at 2:36:47 AM

I buy the argument that a functioning democracy requires the populace to believe that the government is honest, competent, and working in their interests. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Vietnam war (respectively) undermined those notions. As of ~2016, half of the US voting population had come of age after those events.

by InitialLastName

6/13/2026 at 9:00:50 PM

> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me

Countries conduct censuses so they can understand, in great detail, what is going on with the people who make up the country.

With this accurate information, improvement plans can be made, and life can be improved for everyone.

The comments about just making it a head count give a very interesting window into the mentality of many these days. They don’t want to - it can’t fathom how to - make life better.

It’s sad, really

by testing22321

6/13/2026 at 9:21:02 PM

Or worse, they actively don't want to make life better for the "wrong" kind of people.

by fragmede

6/13/2026 at 10:53:42 PM

Eh, that’s the ‘if people do the right thing’ approach.

Many countries use census data to target (or even round up and murder) specific groups of people by religion, ethnicity, etc.

by lazide

6/13/2026 at 11:39:12 PM

"Many countries"? Do you have any evidence for this statement?

I think that actually the US is an outlier.

by angry_octet

6/14/2026 at 12:17:17 AM

When Germany invaded the Netherlands they found it extremely convenient that the Netherlands had a nice centralised paper filing system telling them exactly where all the Jews lived. The Holocaust proceeded more efficiently in the Netherlands than it had in Germany.

by inigyou

6/14/2026 at 11:09:00 AM

That papertrail mattered less than how you make it sound.

France also sent people to the Germans during the occupation, and there was very little info needed. The gov wasn't caring much about due process or lengthy and accurate investigations anyway.

by makeitdouble

6/14/2026 at 1:01:02 AM

Maybe an example that isn’t almost 100 years old ?

by katbyte

6/14/2026 at 2:34:15 AM

Are you joking

     ?
?

    ?

by hackable_sand

6/13/2026 at 11:54:17 PM

Here is a case study from Greece in the ‘20’s, but all you need to do is google ‘ethnic cleansing’ and dig in, and you’ll see government data sources (including census data) all played a part.

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11208589]

“The census was conducted in a period of successive wars and rapid territorial expansion. We focus on the handling of the census data for Macedonia, a newly annexed territory that would soon become the site of the first instance of large-scale ethnic cleansing in modern Europe.”

by lazide

6/14/2026 at 12:33:34 AM

In the original comment, you used the present tense. I think that's what was being questioned.

by mthoms

6/14/2026 at 2:07:11 AM

As I said, look around. China has been (and still is) doing it today with Uighurs. It’s not a new behavior.

by lazide

6/13/2026 at 11:55:40 PM

really? bosnia 1990s, turkey early 1900s, pogroms all over europe in the 19th century, holodomor, china with tibet and uighurs, germany tabulating data on the jews with the help of ibm...

by dnautics

6/14/2026 at 12:49:05 AM

If someone says the holocaust happened, do you demand evidence of the claim? Because that’s exactly what you’ve done here

by wahnfrieden

6/14/2026 at 2:18:24 AM

Can you give an example of an extermination program which was thwarted by a lack of accurate census data?

"The Nazis used a data source to implement an extermination program" is not a statement which proves that your problem was the existence of a data source.

by XorNot

6/14/2026 at 5:39:33 AM

The claim was not that the census is instrumental to e.g. ethnic cleansing, simply that the (micro?)data can be used that way.

by notpushkin

6/14/2026 at 3:22:21 AM

[flagged]

by lazide

6/14/2026 at 1:17:22 AM

Ah yes, the old “bad guys did it 50+ years ago, therefore we shouldn’t collect data that will improve our country”

It’s no shock the standard of living continues to fall in what was once ostensibly the greatest country.

by testing22321

6/13/2026 at 10:56:59 PM

[dead]

by heheheisis

6/13/2026 at 5:20:24 PM

[dead]

by sieabahlpark

6/13/2026 at 4:14:50 PM

Pretty sad, in my opinion. In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure.

I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted to match outcomes more rapidly than otherwise.

I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity - they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them. But as our relative strength wanes, our ability to overcome these forces of inertia does as well. And then our governments become less capable and eventually life starts getting worse.

We don’t need house-level data immediately (except perhaps in order to place census blocks within their appropriate congressional district etc). But there are aggregation units above which we should be using as good information as we possibly could be.

by arjie

6/13/2026 at 4:51:29 PM

> I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure.

Intentionally damaging infrastructure is the recurring theme of this administration.

by tempodox

6/13/2026 at 10:11:18 PM

[flagged]

by smaudet

6/13/2026 at 9:26:03 PM

This does nothing to make government less powerful.

It just makes government stupider so even if they decide they want to do the right thing, now they can’t because they don’t have the information needed to make effective decisions.

by jimbokun

6/13/2026 at 10:36:18 PM

No, it gives them data to attack specific groups of people that were previously anonymized. The two options are less granular data, or data that can be abused.

There is no question the end goal is data that can be abused, and anyone left who would protest their actions will be fired and replaced with more sycophants.

by tw04

6/13/2026 at 11:19:11 PM

That's assuming that this undermining of trust won't result in reduced willingness to share accurate data.

by ajmurmann

6/14/2026 at 12:51:39 AM

Next they will make it a felony to share inaccurate data and use it as justification to send to camps when raiding

by wahnfrieden

6/14/2026 at 4:49:14 AM

It's already a federal crime to lie to the census bureau, it's just not prosecuted for discretionary reasons.

by AlotOfReading

6/14/2026 at 5:06:10 AM

It makes the government stupider so there are more excuses to bring in better private solutions.

Handicap the public services if they are working well, then talk about how bad they are to justify for-profit replacement.

Or don’t and just exploit the gaps directly with better private data, whatever increases proximate wealth inequality.

by svnt

6/14/2026 at 12:18:56 AM

It makes it harder for them to do things, that is both right things and wrong things. They are doing a lot of wrong things recently.

by inigyou

6/13/2026 at 9:52:27 PM

Making them less able to do whatever it is they might want to do is pretty much the definition of making them less powerful.

by thaumasiotes

6/13/2026 at 10:20:50 PM

Feels like they’re hedging their bets. If Republicans stay in power they’re going to keep doing whatever they want; it’s not like they’re making data driven policy decisions today. If they are ousted then the incoming administration has bad data they can’t act on, and Republicans can go back to banging their old drum of “government is useless and dysfunctional”.

by rescripting

6/13/2026 at 10:56:47 PM

repeatedly we see them cause the problem then complain about it.

destroy the tools to make government more effective then complain that government is ineffective.

by toofy

6/13/2026 at 5:08:14 PM

I’d be more interested in giving my state detailed info, letting them run programs. The country can have aggregate data.

by bee_rider

6/13/2026 at 9:15:19 PM

The history of the VRA suggests that several states simply cannot be trusted to do that for all their residents.

by pjc50

6/13/2026 at 9:20:24 PM

This federal administration also cannot be trusted. Perhaps the solution is that both the states and the feds run separate censuses so that any broad stroke manipulation or blind spots can be noticed and reconciled.

by TehCorwiz

6/13/2026 at 11:57:11 PM

Something to check or balance power maybe.

by Avicebron

6/13/2026 at 6:31:26 PM

That works great for real states, but some states are just three mining companies in a trenchcoat.

by NewJazz

6/13/2026 at 9:44:56 PM

The feds have smart people who find the levers to work to get municipal, county, state and private data via voluntary/“voluntary” disclosure.

by helpfulclippy

6/14/2026 at 1:51:50 AM

That would probably not be constitutional. I don't think the states are unable to run their own census, but the Constitution requires a federal one.

by projektfu

6/14/2026 at 5:32:43 AM

How much data is needed to fulfill the constitutional requirement?

by bee_rider

6/13/2026 at 9:54:37 PM

> In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization.

That ideal became tantamount to enabling genocide when the US government breached the confidentiality of the census in order to prison camp the japanese on the basis of their race.

> I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity

It's not even just a question of "all". The state should have the absolute minimum capacity to carry out its necessary tasks. Collecting race (just to give one example of many) of any form is not absolutely necessary and so it should not be done.

> they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them

Because they may be in the future. -- but even that is too strong, the greatest harm perpetrated by state actors has consistently come from trying to "help" rather than intentionally malicious acts.

by nullc

6/14/2026 at 12:28:54 AM

Replying to a dead comment that demanded an example, for example, Mao's mass killing of somewhere on the order of 30-40 million people famine (in addition to the million straight up murdered in the cultural revolution) created as a result of "helping" through planned economy food distribution and the Eliminate Sparrows Campaign.

People only kill at a truly massive scale because they believe they are doing something good or at least necessary (even in war, but especially outside of war). This is why hoping states aren't evil isn't sufficient-- in fact it may induce mass murder, because what could be less evil than to Do the Right thing.

The universal cure is to distribute power and influence in as many ways as practicable, such that the damage from erroneous thinking is contained.

by nullc

6/14/2026 at 1:32:09 AM

Counter point: Government inaction and easily cause deaths at a similar scale, and some types of things only really work with large scale collective action

by jezzamon

6/14/2026 at 2:17:22 AM

I don't agree. When governments aren't stopping people or diverting resources, people can always organize themselves to solve problems... and in practice they do. The existence of states is in many senses the formalization of that.

My comment wasn't intended to be generally anti-government but strongly minimal government. If there is an important thing that requires more government then we should have it-- but we should always be aware of the costs and risks and minimize and diversify where possible.

by nullc

6/13/2026 at 11:13:30 PM

[dead]

by EdwardDiego

6/13/2026 at 4:28:37 PM

But this article is about a decision to damage the census less. If you value an accurate census, you should be celebrating!

by Bratmon

6/13/2026 at 9:02:15 PM

If they follow the rules, preserving privacy via cruder methods, the data will be much more damaged.

For any particular level of privacy, the banned methods can give you more accurate data. For any particular level of accuracy, the banned methods can give you better privacy.

The only way we're getting more accurate data is if the new rule causes them to largely abandon privacy. That would be bad. Harm for no benefit.

by Dylan16807

6/14/2026 at 7:15:25 AM

Data collected by public entities or with funding from the public should be expected to be published in formats digestible by the public. There should be no gatekeeping of the source data.

by Zoombini

6/13/2026 at 4:38:52 PM

TFA lays out why things don't work that way. If you erode trust in the privacy of census responses, an awful lot of folks will have to start lying on their census

by swiftcoder

6/13/2026 at 6:39:55 PM

I think the TFA was very light on evidence that people's desire to respond to the census is increased if the government fabricates the results later

by Bratmon

6/13/2026 at 3:51:42 PM

Whatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.

Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.

by MinimalAction

6/14/2026 at 1:39:36 AM

In Ohio (or at least my county) the deed and mortgage are public record. As is a record when the mortgage is paid off. Interestly also property tax charges and payments are, too

by nijave

6/13/2026 at 4:56:15 PM

> But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.

That frankly sounds more like a failure of enforcement, on top of a failure of the construction of the financial system. Here in Germany, it is absolutely not a common thing that mortgages or the banks holding them get sold like a hot potato towards some other sucker, and thus such a letter would cause immediate suspicion.

by mschuster91

6/13/2026 at 9:10:53 PM

Here in Germany, founding a company creates a public record. There are a number of companies who then send all newly formed companies an invoice that looks like a legitimate invoice for expenses related to creating said company, but on closer inspection actually contain a dense paragraph of text that details that this is not an invoice at all, merely an offer you accept by paying. Quite possibly even a subscription

It's a well-known trick, our notary warned us that these letters would come and we should scrutinize any invoice for a while. But they manage to skirt at the edge of legality

by wongarsu

6/13/2026 at 9:34:50 PM

In the USA you'll get buttloads of mail urging you to do things such as confirm your home warranty at risk of not being covered. With addresses that says "RE: (your mortgage provider)" to make it look like it's from them.

by TomatoCo

6/13/2026 at 11:12:12 PM

Are they actually legal?

Generally those kind of scams setup an illegitimate transaction that would be reversed in a court case.

Whether they rise to a criminal matter is complicated but the vast majority of such scams hold up to scrutiny and instead rely on shell games to make retrieving your funds to expensive to be possible.

by Guvante

6/14/2026 at 12:21:16 AM

Germany follows the law extremely strictly, even more than the USA. If there's no law that says they can't do this, they can do it. Common sense rarely enters the picture in German legal battles

by inigyou

6/14/2026 at 1:34:53 AM

In the US these kinds of scam fail to be legal on the basis of contract law which is way more nuanced than "can't do this"...

I am not talking about common sense I am talking about things like informed consent and consideration.

by Guvante

6/14/2026 at 5:55:13 AM

German law doesn't really care if your consent to a contract was informed or not. If you technically consented, then you consented. This is also how we got the recent thread about .at domains renewing automatically and the registry suing you if you don't pay.

by inigyou

6/14/2026 at 7:50:41 AM

That can happen in the US too... When you agree to a contract you are bound to the terms of it.

Why do you think it is so common to hear horror stories about gym memberships?

But in your example no one agreed to the contract which means no agreement exists.

Generally you can say that payment was agreement to terms but that doesn't work if you deceived to get the payment.

by Guvante

6/13/2026 at 11:46:14 PM

Legality is a matter of enforcement, not of legislation

by LocalH

6/14/2026 at 1:02:04 AM

An earlier article on the same blog had some very useful information on how easily the aggregated census data from 2010 (before differential privacy) could be used to reconstruct real data for individuals: https://desfontain.es/blog/us-census-reconstruction-attack.h...

I am personally convinced that the reason noise infusion was banned was because powerful people were already reconstructing individual data from census for the purpose of gerrymandering, and they wanted to continue gerrymandering.

by kccqzy

6/14/2026 at 10:46:23 AM

Why do you need individual data for gerrymandering? Don't you only need area level?

by thomasahle

6/14/2026 at 10:52:40 AM

To optimally crack a district to bias in one parties favour it is often required to literally run a boundary down a street to separate one side (close to a university, say) from the other.

Once you've table voter preferences to actual street addresses you are no longer in the realm of "broad area cumulative averages and medians".

by defrost

6/14/2026 at 11:28:47 AM

My favorite gerrymandering story was when I learned an ~800 student local college had been split down the middle, so students were in different congressional districts depending on their dorm building.

by themgt

6/14/2026 at 7:10:57 AM

Or worse. It allows anyone to build really targeted data sets. Insurance companies would love such data, and many of those will use them without scruples.

by tgv

6/13/2026 at 3:23:41 PM

Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise.

I don't know what the political undertones are here, but at some level you need to have actual ground truth, including "this person/household declined".

Publishing raw data though? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot from a national security perspective, not to mention all the other reasons not to do it.

by jmole

6/13/2026 at 3:42:22 PM

> Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise.

It is introduced in the public data, not the secret data.

by glitchc

6/14/2026 at 12:09:49 AM

> Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise.

Not sure exactly what you're proposing, but if the noise is added independently to different people, you can just buy multiple copies to reduce it.

There are a lot of ways to do this wrong, which is why so much analysis has gone into differential privacy.

by thomasahle

6/14/2026 at 4:01:30 AM

Sorry, I think you're reading more into this than I intended to say. My point was that the raw data itself doesn't need noise, but the published data necessarily does.

by jmole

6/13/2026 at 4:10:54 PM

i have such a hard time reconciling stuff like this:

> The census bureau decided to adopt differential privacy for the 2020 Census

and:

> The consequences will be dire for utility or for privacy, and possibly both. It's hard to understate this point: future statistical releases will either be useless compared to past ones, or they will be incredibly unsafe

so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.” and for the last census only we added some privacy items. but if we remove just one of those filters, we are in “dire” circumstances? but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

this makes it feel like an emotional overblown problem

by foolfoolz

6/13/2026 at 4:35:49 PM

Believe it or not, mathematical techniques and computational power have increased in the past hundreds of years, not to mention the digitization of everything.

Privacy issues that weren’t possible before due to cost are now pennies to exploit. Also keep in mind as it points out people were using census data to drive gerrymandering efforts, so these attacks are real and have been going on for a long time.

by vlovich123

6/13/2026 at 10:13:19 PM

I don’t understand why gerrymandering would require privacy violation, or how differential privacy would stop it.

by dash2

6/13/2026 at 10:36:48 PM

Gerrymandering is most effective when you know exact voting patterns of each household so you can draw the lines to get the result you want. Differential privacy blurs those boundaries and provides more room for the partisan hacks to make a fatal mistake.

by vlovich123

6/14/2026 at 6:38:48 AM

Sounds very unlikely in practice. Any evidence anyone actually tried to deanonymize this data for this purpose?

by dash2

6/13/2026 at 5:07:37 PM

> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

One notable thing we have today that we didn't have 100 years ago is a computer. Before, you could reasonably assume that recreating individual records wasn't feasible, at least not on a large scale. You can't assume that now. A 4 digit password was safe for hundreds of years, but it would be a security lability today for the same reason.

by antasvara

6/13/2026 at 6:12:01 PM

Computers and improvements in data science/machine learning are basically the entire explanation. A LOT of the techniques that we use today to de-anonymize data require computation power not previously available. Even when doable, resources limited scale. Source: statistics degree

(Also, linkage. There are more data sources to cross reference now with the internet and social media and web tracking and hacks - the record footprint of Americans even as recently as the 70s and 80s was dramatically lower!)

by cheesecakegood

6/13/2026 at 4:31:39 PM

The concerns here, like most concerns about privacy, are hyperbolic hypothetical hypochondria, until they’re not.

by LPisGood

6/14/2026 at 3:49:51 AM

> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

If you are choosing hundreds of years ago, when we had no computers and internet, I wonder how we had worse privacy than the surveillance world today.

> so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.”

Yes because we didn't have computers to unearth patterns in the data in a millisecond and politicians could have their career ended for doing the wrong thing, when revealed, instead of being rewarded for it.

by noisy_boy

6/14/2026 at 6:49:07 AM

> so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.”

It wasn't ok - it's been shown that the data released could individually identify people in releases before the 2010 Census.

by nl

6/13/2026 at 4:51:09 PM

For decades we were encrypting our communications with rsa, surely nothing is wrong with it?

by baq

6/13/2026 at 5:29:49 PM

There is nothing wrong with it, and RSA is still commonly used. In fact, RSA is better against quantum computers compared to ECC.

by gkbrk

6/13/2026 at 5:31:31 PM

As the article clearly states, privacy features have been in the census since 1990. It is just that the previously used privacy feature was not very strong and could be defeated. So it was replaced by a stronger feature in 1920. Before 1990 the census. 1990 was when personal computers were being popularized and the computing power available to individuals exploded and so then it was possible to use computers to separate out individual information from the data the census publishes. So the issue came up then.

No it is not an overblown problem.

by hristov

6/13/2026 at 6:37:19 PM

As far as I recall they did have some measures in place. Differential privacy just made it a bit more robust.

Arguably the defaults for differential privacy are too robust but that is a different story.

by shiandow

6/13/2026 at 3:22:54 PM

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way.

It’s a census: it just asks questions.

If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

by asolove

6/13/2026 at 4:12:11 PM

You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

by ShinyLeftPad

6/13/2026 at 5:34:33 PM

It happened a year ago in this country, with IRS sharing data with ICE (breaking a longstanding policy of keeping taxpayer data private within the government).

by comex

6/13/2026 at 5:18:53 PM

If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.

by kajman

6/13/2026 at 9:08:42 PM

I think there are likely camps "with unusually high death counts" already in the US, but since ICE has clammed shut on the statistics, we don't and can't know. I think by the time the US settles on its future, the horrors that will arise from our very own camps will match the Nazis

by sylos

6/13/2026 at 11:33:08 PM

We easily could exceed their atrocities, because our modern capacities for inflicting harm are better, faster, and cheaper.

by voakbasda

6/14/2026 at 2:06:05 AM

That's a very strong statement. I'm absolutely no fan of ICE or indefinite detention of people based on where they were born, but I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states. Nor do I see that in our future.

by Loughla

6/14/2026 at 5:49:19 AM

So if the death camps hadn't been for the purpose of genocide but rather for disposing of the poor or convicted criminals or perhaps those suspected of being illegal immigrants would that have made them okay? It seems to me that "I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states" is largely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

by fc417fc802

6/14/2026 at 7:20:35 AM

You're making the argument the Nazis only deported people?

Sounds ironically more generous than the actual nazis claiming it either didn't happen or was 'deserved'.

by DaSHacka

6/14/2026 at 11:26:15 AM

I'm making the argument that the ideological or political underpinnings of the nazi's actions aren't what's relevant when drawing parallels regarding concrete abuses. It doesn't matter why the people are being interned, what matters is any violations of human rights and the associated responses.

by fc417fc802

6/13/2026 at 9:27:44 PM

They didn’t have drones.

by cwmoore

6/13/2026 at 4:02:16 PM

The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more.

The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.

by bagels

6/13/2026 at 8:13:20 PM

There is a significant movement in conservative circles that "the census should literally only be a count". this could be a wedge to prevent detailed demographic data collection by the government

by dnautics

6/13/2026 at 8:28:35 PM

If you don’t count people of different races, nationalities, origin, then you can pretend there are only white people. You don’t know if there are any marginalized people gathered in say an extremely poor neighborhood, because they are all people.

I see it as a way to pretend there’s just white people.

by Alive-in-2025

6/14/2026 at 7:21:32 AM

Why would a conservative want to pretend that? When was the last time you actually talked to one?

by DaSHacka

6/14/2026 at 1:05:12 AM

Do you think the only, or even primary, thing that determines if a person is marginalized is the color of their skin? -- even taking that you're talking about a POOR neighborhood as a prior?

by nullc

6/13/2026 at 8:32:34 PM

Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them.

by Arodex

6/14/2026 at 12:23:29 AM

MAGA is conservatism. Political factions evolve over time.

by inigyou

6/14/2026 at 1:55:16 AM

It's not the entirety of conservatism, however the Tea Party evolved into MAGA and got what they wanted. Generalisations lead to fallacies, have a nice day.

by MajorTakeaway

6/13/2026 at 8:38:49 PM

The problem is not that MAGA "ate them, chew them and spit them", but that the traditional neoliberal shit GOP circles "ate, chew and spit" the MAGA movement and what people voted Trump for. Instead Trump was fully assimilated to the Borg/Swamp, with a big fuck you to the MAGA promises (except the show he put on about immigration).

by coldtea

6/13/2026 at 9:11:20 PM

Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

And I wouldn't say he served existing entrenched interests very well either. To the extent he touched the swamp it was to put in worse people only he liked.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 10:23:14 PM

>Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

Doesn't matter for the point of the argument, he was elected on that promise, and others, that he eventually broke.

by coldtea

6/14/2026 at 12:21:00 AM

If you want to argue the problem is he got "assimilated" then you have to argue he originally would have made a real attempt to fulfill the promise. My assessment is: no way.

by Dylan16807

6/14/2026 at 8:26:25 AM

If only there had been clues he might be a liar... Really, it was completely unexpected, he used to be so honest.

by Arodex

6/13/2026 at 11:44:51 PM

It was so transparent that it was going to happen, I really question if anyone legitimately believed it.

Might as well have literally voted for the fox to be in charge of the hen house. ‘Oh no, but they promised they wouldn’t do that!’

by lazide

6/13/2026 at 8:22:03 PM

But a count of what?

by xnx

6/13/2026 at 8:26:49 PM

Population in a city?

by radiator

6/13/2026 at 8:29:46 PM

Wouldnt that hurt the conservative cause though?

by boppo1

6/13/2026 at 8:58:14 PM

Count of people - brown people removed = success

by fragmede

6/14/2026 at 7:23:20 AM

More like `people - brown people = success` among the crowd

by DaSHacka

6/13/2026 at 6:18:56 PM

yeah,

and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form.

(1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full

by dathinab

6/13/2026 at 7:04:40 PM

Canada also did this to its Japanese

by wahnfrieden

6/13/2026 at 11:20:53 PM

Interesting to see this downvoted. The mechanism was different - not a tax scheme, but rather the Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.

by wahnfrieden

6/14/2026 at 12:12:01 AM

> Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.

While the mechanism was different that was what _effectively_ happened to US Japanese people, too. The taxes part is more like a separate mechanism of discrimination against anyone "new" which "happened" to overlap with this (and tbh. I have no idea to which degree this overlap was intentional or just "tolerated").

--

But if I have to guess why someone down voted the comment (not me) ti might be because it feels a bit like trying to downplaying how bad and against the values the US claimed it stood for, this was. And doing so by pointing at some random other country and saying "they also did bad things so we aren't that bad" which is a really bad argument.

Just because others also have done bad things doesn't mean anything is less bad, or more reasonable or more excusable.

I mean a lot of countries did some pretty bad things in the past, especially the past 200 years.

When I post about stuff like that it's isn't about saying "hey they are bad". It's more because I think people from countries should be aware about all the bad stuff their country did/was done in their country. So that they can learn from this.

But sadly most countries try to bury most mistake, atrocities, large scale crimes etc. in history or at least exclude them from anything thought proactively, e.g. in school. And the only way to know about them is to go looking for them by yourself in your free time. Which doesn't work well even if you care as it's hard to learn what you don't know you don't know.

Like as a random example the tulsa race massacre should be required teaching in middle school with focus on the dynamics which lead to a mob of people including people in governing positions to thinking it is okay to try to lynch a whole district (more or less, simplified).

Or e.g. in Canada there is the genocide of indigenous people (which by now might be through about in school, not sure).

Or in Germany the genocide against Jews (which is thought a lot in middle school as required teaching material).

Or the crimes Japan committed against China in WW2 and before (which they still bury very deeply AFIK).

Or a pretty long list of atrocities in China science 1900.

The important part here isn't teaching "that" it happened, but "why/how" it happened, so that if stuff goes in the same bad direction again people realize it and (hopefully) stop it.

If we don't learn from the past I really don't know how humans as a species expect to not accidentally collectively press Alt+F4, given the increasingly higher stacks/larger powers involved.

by dathinab

6/14/2026 at 12:52:52 AM

No, I don’t mean to downplay - it was horrific and exploitative terror in both countries with terrible lasting effects. I just mentioned it because it’s less well known than what America did and because even Canadians might know what their country did to indigenous populations but not to its own citizens in this case (over 90% of Japanese in the country were sent to camps and most of them were Canadian citizens). Canadians sometimes forget the demonstrated capacity for their own country to do violence on its own people (not to downplay indigenous issues either of course, which are better understood), with a smugness about how much worse American government behaves.

by wahnfrieden

6/13/2026 at 8:58:50 PM

Databases are neutral until someone asks them for a list.

by willXare

6/13/2026 at 4:04:04 PM

Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now.

First they came for…

by conception

6/13/2026 at 4:12:47 PM

What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?

by whattheheckheck

6/13/2026 at 4:33:04 PM

Voting and getting everyone you know to vote

by estearum

6/13/2026 at 5:56:13 PM

And civically engaging. Less than a fifth of voters regularly contact their electeds.

by JumpCrisscross

6/13/2026 at 7:52:45 PM

Yes more people should vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).

by rayiner

6/13/2026 at 8:04:53 PM

Yes, more people should vote.

Always funny when Trumpers try to this out as a gotcha lmao.

As a believer in democracy, I think it's better that our government is more responsive rather than less responsive to the public.

by estearum

6/13/2026 at 8:26:15 PM

High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent.

I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters.

I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.

by rayiner

6/13/2026 at 9:11:20 PM

I don't know who the

> The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats

are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.

by fragmede

6/13/2026 at 9:30:18 PM

Your model doesn’t eliminate politics, it just entrenches the particular politics of the kind of people who go to T10 schools then get jobs as division heads at federal agencies.[1]

There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood that, and their solution to the problem was frequent elections, not the fiction of neutral, apolitical credentialed bureaucrats.

[1] A good example of this is the bank bailouts in the first Obama administration. Even though the voters were outraged at Wall Street, Obama followed the bailout strategy developed by Wall Street. He replaced Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) with Tim Geithner (NY Fed then private equity), but everyone underneath stayed the same and the bailout strategy stayed the same.

by rayiner

6/13/2026 at 9:51:37 PM

It's not a fiction. People do their jobs even if they don't like the current or past President. I'm sure you can pull out a long list of people who didn't, but unless you name everybody, it simply isn't a fiction. My claim isn't bureaucrats are always apolitical, it's that they mostly are. Showing that some aren't doesn't show that they mostly are.

Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden. They file paperwork and schedule appointments for the diplomat. Their role is operational. Logistics stuff. Coordinating what goes where. Setup a meeting between three very important busy people and juggle their calendars. Does that position really need to be someone we vote for? They do operations, not make policy.

by fragmede

6/14/2026 at 12:24:05 AM

If career bureaucrats were just scheduling appointments and filing paperwork, I’d agree with you. But that’s not how these agencies work. Career civil servants are doing entire rulemakings, creating rules that have the force of law. They are preparing enforcement campaigns targeted at entire industries. They are setting internal priorities and policies. And the elected officials have limited ability to control what’s going on if the careers don’t cooperate.

In law school I was an intern for a Commissioner at the FCC. The Bureaus, which were staffed by career civil servants, would send entire rules and orders (hundreds of pages) fully formed up for the political appointees to vote on. Now, I think the career folks at the FCC are fantastic and very responsive to policy changes between administrations.[1] But that’s not true for many agencies. And in those agencies, the career civil servants wield tremendous power and make it very hard for appointees to implement policy the careers disagree with.

[1] Part of this is that, some high-profile stuff aside, there is a consistent ideology between the parties at the FCC. The republicans completely won in the 1980s and almost everyone takes a “law and economics” approach to communications regulations. So the careers are operating from the same analytical framework as the political appointees regardless of who is in power.

by rayiner

6/13/2026 at 11:47:28 PM

‘Because I say so’? Really?

by lazide

6/13/2026 at 5:30:18 PM

The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.

by YeahThisIsMe

6/13/2026 at 5:38:06 PM

No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.

by patrick451

6/13/2026 at 7:38:54 PM

You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy. A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is one with in which someone is right and someone is wrong. (Or, more complicatedly, someone is closer to accurate and someone is cherry-picking.)

If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.

by JoshTriplett

6/13/2026 at 8:02:20 PM

> you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it.

The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California.

The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully designed to hide evidence and prevent detection.

You are obviously an intelligent person but you've allowed your curiosity to be subjugated by propaganda.

by SadErn

6/13/2026 at 9:26:12 PM

You are creating an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and not attempting to falsify it.

Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?

by JoshTriplett

6/13/2026 at 10:15:52 PM

[dead]

by SadErn

6/13/2026 at 9:21:32 PM

The fun part about this is that it depends on facts that nobody actually knows.

If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative.

The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.

by AnthonyMouse

6/13/2026 at 6:24:49 PM

> they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting

Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.)

In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively.

(That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)

by JumpCrisscross

6/13/2026 at 7:40:00 PM

If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?

Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that?

It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected.

by prepend

6/13/2026 at 7:53:01 PM

Perhaps so, but you still have to show that it is happening, not merely that it is possible. Moreover, you have to show that whatever cures you propose are both 1/proportional to the harm and 2/minimize undesirable side effects. (One challenge with the latter is that for some people, those side effects are actually desirable.)

by otterley

6/14/2026 at 7:42:52 AM

> If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?

You get followed up in an audit, if anyone asks. This happened like three million times in Arizona.

> there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected

There are. None of the proposed plans limit them. (No county requires scanning and biometrically verifying passports. You could buy a wrapper on eBay and inkjet the pages in most counties.)

There are also lots of ways to blow up public buildings. We don’t require ID to enter DC because the frequency of the harm isn’t matched by the cost of enforcement.

by JumpCrisscross

6/13/2026 at 8:02:10 PM

Can you describe specifically how someone finds enough complaint-free absentee ballots and sick friends to vote at any meaningful scale?

Doing this even 10 times seems unbelievably hard.

by estearum

6/13/2026 at 9:16:15 PM

It seems less hard if you datamine the shit out of everything, exfiltrate the social security database, and feed it into a computer. Get the historical voting records. SELECT address FROM voters that haven't voted in 10 years. Send someone to follow the mailman and steal ballots from that address. Or simply don't mail them out in the first place. They're not likely to notice to complain in the first place.

Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination.

by fragmede

6/13/2026 at 11:48:03 PM

You’re describing an attack that entails both hacking the SSN database, 1 to 50 of the state voter databases, then physically following mailmen around and stealing ballots…

by estearum

6/14/2026 at 12:07:26 AM

I think he’s referencing the doge boys getting access to social security files and taking them

by lovich

6/13/2026 at 10:30:17 PM

We already handle all of that, comrade. Every corner case floating around your brain was floating around someone else's brain a long time ago. Most of this is covered in high school in the US, and it's all enforced by volunteers from across the political spectrum.

Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.

by gopher_space

6/13/2026 at 11:49:28 PM

You have sign the ballot, and it gets checked.

by lazide

6/13/2026 at 7:14:07 PM

Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.

by Jiro

6/13/2026 at 8:03:30 PM

Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?

Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step.

Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.

by estearum

6/13/2026 at 10:35:01 PM

Feds made a nice write up for you, if you are actually curious: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-ch...

by pandaman

6/13/2026 at 11:52:26 PM

Okay so in this scenario, if this woman wanted to actually vote on behalf of these people, all she had to do was pay a bunch of people to register with her address, get 10, 30, 100, or 1000 ballots mailed to her address, then fill out all of those ballots and mail them in and hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address that would clearly and directly implicate the person who lives at/otherwise controls that address?

And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

(To be clear, this isn’t what DOJ is alleging, they alleged she was just collecting petition signatures, but I’m extrapolating out your proposed mechanism for actual voting)

by estearum

6/14/2026 at 1:01:49 AM

>hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address

So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

>And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

by pandaman

6/14/2026 at 1:13:37 AM

> Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

Huh? There is literally no evidence or even allegation of that. The person was paid to collect petition signatures, so she fraudulently obtained petition signatures. Which obviously are way less closely tracked than actual votes.

> So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

Well it's not illegal to register multiple voters at the same address, obviously. It's illegal to vote under someone else's name. A bunch of votes coming in from a single residence would be flagged. Should voter registrations from a single address get flagged? Sure! And they probably do! But as you say, that's not a crime. Voting fraudulently is, which is not even alleged here.

by estearum

6/14/2026 at 1:22:29 AM

Not sure what you are doing now. You asked for a scheme, you got it and now are appearing to be saying that such a scheme would not work because people would get busted even though you admit yourself there would not be any evidence.

by pandaman

6/14/2026 at 2:17:05 AM

Here was my request:

> Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?

You literally just described a scheme that is possible to detect in any meaningful amount. 10, 100, or 1000 ballots coming from a single address is, obviously, trivially detectable.

by estearum

6/14/2026 at 2:25:21 AM

I see. It's possible to detect the scheme per se even though the detection would not lead to charges (ballots from the people registered at the same address are completely legal) and thus would not be conducted. The point your correspondent has initially made: it's impossible to detect illegal voting in such a scheme.

by pandaman

6/14/2026 at 11:18:34 AM

What...?

Virtually every type of fraud is first detected by detection of a nominally legal but abnormal behavior, then it's investigated to figure out whether fraud actually occurred. That would – obviously – be exactly how any voter fraud detection scheme works, but I guess you're saying that because the initially detected abnormality is not itself illegal, it wouldn't be investigated?

This is like saying "it's not illegal for all the numbers on your tax return to end in $xxxx.00 and $xxxx.50, so therefore tax fraud is undetectable by means of analyzing numerical patterns."

by estearum

6/14/2026 at 12:16:33 PM

Now you are just saying "illegal voting can be detected in this scheme even though I don't know how". Very smart!

by pandaman

6/14/2026 at 10:01:31 AM

> even though the detection would not lead to charges

Didn't you cite a charging document upthread?

by JumpCrisscross

6/14/2026 at 12:14:24 PM

Yes I did, did you read what I cited upthread?

by pandaman

6/13/2026 at 4:38:16 PM

Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.

by p-e-w

6/13/2026 at 4:42:11 PM

Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same.

Voting for the worse people makes things worse.

by estearum

6/13/2026 at 6:31:51 PM

Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates.

RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate.

It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help.

ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is hard for SCOTUS to torpedo (though I suppose I shouldn't underestimate SCOTUS).

by rectang

6/13/2026 at 7:44:19 PM

100% -- RCV is a super important part of this equation in the long run.

by estearum

6/13/2026 at 7:37:12 PM

Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”.

https://www.rangevoting.org/CompChart.html#votsysts

by nerdsniper

6/14/2026 at 12:11:55 AM

RCV completely solves the “spoiler candidate” problem, which is a huge issue limiting choice and innovation in the two-party-dominated US. Approval Voting remains susceptible to spoilers.

In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhetorical advantages are inconsequential.

by rectang

6/14/2026 at 5:38:11 AM

No, approval voting effectively solves spoilers. For example, the Green Party can't be a spoiler for the Democratic Party as people who like both will simply vote for both. RCV has its own novel form of spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze

The 2022 Alaska special election is a great example of RCV failing where approval voting wouldn't. And FairVote had the nerve to say it showed Alaskans understood and could use the system.

> Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around

It's a lot easier to claim the system is rigged when the voting system is much more complex in a way that most voters will not understand.

by gs17

6/13/2026 at 9:20:00 PM

We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.

And that's electoral votes. Counting actual people has the most voted candidate lose all the time.

Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two. If I don't check my third choice then I risk them losing to even worse options.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 9:42:50 PM

> We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.

And people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment.

> Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two.

Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting. Instead of scoring each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, it's score each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1. Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.

Both of them are still better than RCV.

by AnthonyMouse

6/13/2026 at 9:51:13 PM

> Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting.

I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.

> Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.

That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".

> Both of them are still better than RCV.

I don't see how.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 10:38:13 PM

> I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.

Compressing it makes it slightly worse, but some people think it makes it easier to understand. I tend to think that's silly; people can understand "score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10" perfectly well. But approval voting would still be a significant improvement over FPTP, and even over RCV.

> That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".

RCV doesn't solve that either, because it's subject to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It's actually even worse, because it makes you give a lower rank (rather than an equal one) to your most favored candidate to prevent an even worse candidate from winning.

Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate.

Meanwhile with score voting your favorite candidate might have won, because they were the first choice of only 20% but the second choice of everyone else, and then end up with an average score of e.g. 6 when all the others are at 4 and 5.

RCV tends to do the opposite of that. If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes. Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.

by AnthonyMouse

6/14/2026 at 12:19:11 AM

> Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate.

Let's call those candidates A B X Y.

I don't see the issue. I vote my actual ranking, A is eliminated. If this scenario isn't super weirdly convoluted, more of those votes shift to B than X, so X is eliminated next. Now it's B versus Y. If I vote for B instead, the same thing happens and we also get B versus Y.

And what happens here in score voting could be basically anything. Not enough specifics.

> If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes.

Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.

> Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.

Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy. Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.

by Dylan16807

6/14/2026 at 5:53:16 AM

> If this scenario isn't super weirdly convoluted, more of those votes shift to B than X, so X is eliminated next.

It doesn't have to be that convoluted, all it takes is for the eliminated candidate to be a moderate so their votes go in two different directions. But you're right that I messed up that example; the percentages are wrong.

The problem case is when your second most favored candidate would otherwise be eliminated first and you need to prevent that by causing your most favored candidate to be eliminated instead, because the second best candidate has a better chance in the next round.

Suppose the candidates you dislike, X and Y, are the first choice of 40% and 25% of people respectively, and then A and B split the remainder evenly. X and Y are the two extremists -- on opposite sides of each other, with the moderates A and B in the middle. You favor A but A leans in the direction of X and B leans in the direction of Y.

If B is eliminated first then half of B's support goes A but half goes to Y, Y is still ahead of A and then A is eliminated next. If A -- your preferred candidate -- is eliminated first, half their support goes to B and the other half to X but Y gets nothing. Y then loses to B and the final round is X vs. B rather than X vs. Y. And the elimination of Y puts all their support behind B since X is the opposite extreme. But only if you rank B above A even though that's not what you'd have preferred.

> Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.

But now you're no longer using RCV/IRV. Score voting is a Condorcet method.

> Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy.

Except that doesn't really help them because doing that also makes it more likely that their least favorite candidate wins, which is a significant incentive not to do it. The only reason to do that is if you're confident your favored candidate could only lose to your second choice, in which case it was really a two candidate race to begin with.

> Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.

It doesn't matter if they're in the same party or not. If you're using a voting system that allows more than two parties to be viable then you'll have similar candidates running from similar parties. "Force the election to be one candidate from each of two major parties" is FPTP and it's terrible.

by AnthonyMouse

6/13/2026 at 9:38:46 PM

That site promotes range voting, and rather superficially dismisses approval voting: "Why Range Voting is Better than Approval Voting": https://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html

We've got MMP here in New Zealand, which is a fantastic improvement over what we had. However the list vote does give politicians some weird power.

Comment moderation is voting too.

by robocat

6/13/2026 at 9:38:43 PM

> Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost”

As a non-US-American, it is hard to understand for me why this is so hard to explain: the amount of #1 votes is rather a measure for the number of "ultra-fans" that the candidate has.

I think it should be rather easy to find an example in US-American pop culture of some C-list celebrity who has a respectable base of very devoted ultra-fans, but is hated by basically everybody else.

This example should make the fallacy obvious to most people.

by aleph_minus_one

6/13/2026 at 5:14:28 PM

You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).

by gs17

6/13/2026 at 6:22:22 PM

Vote strategically. Candidates notice btw.

So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters that way. They figured out that the mainstay voters will just end up voting left or right regardless, and that by catering to the extremes it actually pulls the mainstream voters too. (Both Reps and Dems are using this strategy)

Remember, you don't have to vote for the person you actually like.

And keep doing this until we get a sane voting system which can embed actual preference (any of the cardinal systems: i.e. Approval or STAR). This strategy still works with ordinal systems (i.e. Ranked Choice) because a weak spoiler is still really good at splitting the vote (happened in a pretty famous Alaska election).

by godelski

6/14/2026 at 5:48:48 AM

That still requires the options. The next election for me is a primary, with only one race that both has more than one candidate and is competitive AFAIK. The two viable candidates (who will both move on regardless) are similar enough that I don't have a preference. WA has an interesting, non-partisan, top-two-move-on system for the non-presidential primaries.

by gs17

6/13/2026 at 8:25:56 PM

Republicans in my state, TN, having eliminated the last Democrat congressional district, now want to close primaries, precisely to prevent strategic voting.

by dubya

6/13/2026 at 8:17:37 PM

Totally agree. I did exactly this in the recent primaries, and then got to vote again in a runoff.

I think of it this way: in a state where one party is clearly dominant, most offices will end up being held by members of that party. That means that the primaries for that party actually matter more than the general election.

by usefulcat

6/13/2026 at 6:18:56 PM

Somewhere between just going out to vote and revolution sits moving to an area where your vote counts.

I’ve not quite reached that threshold, but I avoid moving to DC due to the lack of voting rights.

by Retric

6/13/2026 at 7:17:34 PM

Protesting one weekend day every 6 months will obviously do nothing. The pressure needs to be non stop

by dgellow

6/13/2026 at 8:07:41 PM

I highly recommend the research done by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Yochai Benkler.

In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging.

You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.

by intended

6/13/2026 at 5:13:01 PM

> Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high.

In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over.

There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up.

The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them.

The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here.

It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy.

Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again.

by deaux

6/13/2026 at 5:39:12 PM

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote.

Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive), it's at least not voting the most in your interests for the outcome. Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses.

But I agree with the rest of it, if none of the candidates represent you, the third-party vote at least allows you to send a signal of "I vote, but you need to make me want to vote for you, and this is what I want".

by gs17

6/14/2026 at 1:22:32 AM

> Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive),

Fully agreed, I vaguely implied this by talking about the "lesser of two evils" scenario but good to make it explicit.

> Which is why we really need approval voting,

Agreed here too, but it's not happening so people better wake up and realize that even without it, continuously voting for the "lesser of two evils" is the opposite of strategic.

by deaux

6/13/2026 at 6:56:41 PM

> Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses.

Approval voting would not end strategic voting.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Strategic_voti...

by pseudalopex

6/14/2026 at 5:31:48 AM

Yes, but it specifically ends the "vote for a candidate you dislike instead of the one you do like" type. Strategic approval voting is simply setting a higher/lower threshold on your approval. Your favorite is always included in your vote (assuming you like at least one candidate).

by gs17

6/13/2026 at 6:04:26 PM

> 2024 [...] the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term.

You mean the 2024 election cycle where incumbents all around the globe were beaten because the economic situation was strongly anti-incumbent? Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate? Even though a swing of 115k votes would have handed the presidency to Harris instead?

It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...

by zimpenfish

6/14/2026 at 1:32:57 AM

> Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate?

There is never a sole factor. The problem by talking about 115k votes is, once again, not taking into account the strength of the opposition. The US losing in hockey to Canada by a tiny margin is not the same as losing to Spain by the same margin.

Ironically, in a sense you're only strengthening the point that an even moderately better candidate would've won.

> It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...

What a vile implication. Selectively ignoring my mention of Newsom in the exact same bucket. I'm wondering if you're a state-backed operator, that might explain the trying to rile things up through FUD.

I mentioned 2016 and 2024 because they lost, and the candidates were indeed awful.

by deaux

6/13/2026 at 7:26:54 PM

Democratic candidate, not "Democrat candidate".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_%28epithet%29?w...

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. People didn't want Trump in 2016, they wanted her. But he won the electoral college,

He won the popular vote in 2024, but the tight margin in the electoral college suggests a democratically elected Democratic candidate (i.e. one selected by a primary, not one appointed by the sitting president) could have won instead. Other potential candidates were polling better than Harriss. I personally think Gretchen Whitmer could have successfully distanced herself from the Biden administration and defeated Trump.

by fugalfervor

6/13/2026 at 5:53:43 PM

> Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it,

Ok I'll break it down for you.

> If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party

Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb

It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality. This doesn't change unless the first past the post system changes. Why do you think the GOP backs the Green Party?

by mullingitover

6/14/2026 at 1:26:41 AM

> Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.

Reality shows the exact opposite. Why do campaigns and candidates put an incredibly outsized effort into swing states? Those are the exact "unreliable voters". Yet they get the most attenton. In policies too, it's all about convincing those who otherwise might stay home or might swing. What you're saying doesn't reflect reality whatsoever.

> It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality.

This isn't an argument, or you struggled to read. It's not a wasted vote because of its secondary effects, as explained. Voting on someone who loses isn't a wasted vote.

by deaux

6/13/2026 at 6:42:38 PM

> Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.

I wish more people understood this. Instead, there's this mistaken notion that you give away leverage by supplying votes. It's literally the opposite.

Your coalition will have more influence and leverage within a party by supplying votes, not withholding them.

by SmirkingRevenge

6/13/2026 at 8:37:19 PM

Really the hack to get outsized influence in a party is to show up in the primaries.

NYC has a DSA mayor because people used that one weird trick.

The other important one is showing up in local elections.

by mullingitover

6/13/2026 at 5:44:42 PM

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate.

Tried that in 2000, voting for Nader as a protest vote against Clinton/Gore third way neoliberalism. I did that in a state where the electoral votes for Dems were 100% safe. Still just got blamed for Bush and there was zero self-reflection on the part of the Democratic Party.

...

I would urge everyone to stop fixating on the Presidential vote as the only fight to win and everything being win/lose based on that outcome. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House exceeds 50% of Democrats in the House, then we can start thinking about a world where e.g. AOC might be the speaker of the House rather than Nancy Pelosi.

> It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election.

Yeah, and the Office of the President is 4-8 years and is just more short-termism, along with individualism / cult of personality / CEO-leadership. If you want to make lasting change in the DNC, start by flipping more and more House seats to progressive from neoliberal.

by dualvariable

6/13/2026 at 6:50:58 PM

The legislative seats are barely more malleable than the executive ones, and they’re a lot cheaper to buy off. Even with grassroots efforts to elect local candidates and move them up, it takes a perfect storm to actually get someone that’s even modestly different than the empty suits that largely fill those seats already.

I have zero faith in this system to execute anything other than purchased policy agendas, or empower any more than a tiny symbolic collection of people who oppose them… just enough to give the illusion of agency and stop any real organizing. I have no idea what could possibly break this pattern.

by DrewADesign

6/13/2026 at 7:08:55 PM

The Republicans were successful with the Tea Party in taking over the House and the Presidency, that's a model which I'd argue is really proven to work in our two party system because we all just literally watched it play out in real-time.

Arguing against that, probably comes from a cynical neoliberal perspective where the Democratic Party can't change because the argument assumes that the Democratic Party can't change.

And the alternative is definitely outright fascism and the suspension of Democracy. They've told us what they're planning on doing, just like we knew they wanted to get rid of Roe vs. Wade, we just accepted the lies about it being settled law and a political football.

If you're not willing to vote against that, then you're comfortably middle class and don't think you'll be one of the ones that are going to be hurt.

I've voted against Trump 3 times and threw money behind trying to get Sanders the nomination in 2020 instead of Biden, so when all the horrible stuff has been going down this term I don't have to tie myself in knots with rationalizations about my actions.

by dualvariable

6/14/2026 at 12:00:07 PM

The Tea Party had the support of the Koch brothers, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, et al. They had a VP puppet on the bill, Palin, almost immediately after their inception, despite McCain being a center-leaning Republican. It was not a grassroots movement. Make any unfounded assumption you like about my motivation, and construct and straw men you want between you and that reality, but it is reality. It was bought and paid for before anybody had even heard of it. The closest thing the democrats have seen to a national-scale grassroots political initiative was Sanders, and the DNC torpedoed it reflexively.

by DrewADesign

6/13/2026 at 5:43:50 PM

> Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted

Because it's dumb. People don't want to hear dumb ideas, or take the time to try and convince someone that would spend however long it took to type that, apparently multiple times, without realizing it. Throwing away votes will never be the reasonable thing to do. I know you don't want to hear that, because it's too painful for you to admit there's no simple answer.

by kgwxd

6/13/2026 at 6:39:48 PM

Please, explain to me how voting for a candidate you don't like is not throwing away your vote, but voting for a candidate you support is.

by t-3

6/13/2026 at 5:23:25 PM

You are saying the candidates are forced on us by someone else. But that's just wrong, we choose the candidates. Anybody can run, there is no secret cabal that decides who can run and who can't.

by amanaplanacanal

6/13/2026 at 5:47:22 PM

Didn't happen last year when Kamila was selected by the leaders.

But in normal years candidates are successful because of the amount of money they can raise. The more they can raise the more brainwashing ads they can buy. The non so secret cabal is the donor class.

Anyone can run? You must meet requirements on age and how long you have lived in the US. You must pay fees and provide signatures for each state. If doing it through a party you have to meet their rules.

Cost to get on most states ballots at a basic level is a million. You could do it for free if you dont want to appear on any ballots.

by ipaddr

6/13/2026 at 5:40:06 PM

The ideal is that anyone can run, but it's not that easy to just start an independent campaign that has a decent chance of winning. Local races are the most realistic "anyone can run" arena, but once you need a lot of travel and logistics in a large region, you either need a lot of your own resources or the support of an existing large political organization.

by gs17

6/13/2026 at 5:36:21 PM

You do know the former head of the DNC was forced to retire after the leaked emails outed her, and basically all of the top of the DNC, extensively conspiring against Sanders in favor of Clinton? [1] You're right the cabal isn't secret - it's literally the DNC, and who they want to win is who will win, one way or the other. Just reading over that source - it's insane how blatant these people can be:

"In May 2016, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski accused the DNC of bias against the Sanders campaign and called on Wasserman Schultz to step down. Wasserman Schultz was upset at the negative media coverage of her actions, and she emailed the political director of NBC News, Chuck Todd, that such coverage of her "must stop". Describing the coverage as the "LAST straw", she ordered the DNC's communications director to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

by somenameforme

6/13/2026 at 7:39:40 PM

I mean, why wouldn't they? Bernie is not a Democrat, he's independent. Winning elections for their own party is the whole reason DNC exists.

by cyberax

6/13/2026 at 6:48:35 PM

A primary role of political parties has traditionally been to filter candidates. It's literally their raison d'etre

Sanders wasn't even a Democrat. He switched solely to run in the primary. It's neither scandalous nor surprising that the DNC would try to put up barriers between him and the nomination.

If the RNC had done it's job, Trump would never have been allowed into the primary in the first place.

by SmirkingRevenge

6/13/2026 at 7:43:17 PM

> A primary role of political parties has traditionally been to filter candidates. It's literally their raison d'etre

Yes, that's exactly why they shouldn't exist.

by JoshTriplett

6/13/2026 at 9:44:37 PM

I don't know about that, but if they exist, they need to be stronger institutions that take more of an active role in picking/filtering candidates.

The introduction of the partisan primary has been an unmitigated disaster for our politics, by massively empowering the most zealous fringes within parties

by SmirkingRevenge

6/13/2026 at 6:34:26 PM

The trend has been going that direction, where low turnout elections favor Ds and high turnout favors Rs. But only kind of... that holds when Trump is on the ballot. Trump seems to activate a segment of low-info, low-propensity voters who stay home when their guy isn't on the ballot. Things will probably get scrambled again once Trump is gone though.

And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it.

That really matters.

In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation.

(The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this)

Also see: https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-...

by SmirkingRevenge

6/13/2026 at 7:09:46 PM

Definitely not, you may, at best, shift the problems to someone else. Both of "our" political parties are beyond redemption and cannot be reformed (if they were very not terrible in the first place). The only thing that will change outcomes is direct action and I'm including limitless scaling of that including the armed defense of your ideals.

by sosomoxie

6/13/2026 at 8:01:34 PM

Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”.

Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.

by vjulian

6/13/2026 at 9:43:48 PM

Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.

by robotresearcher

6/14/2026 at 12:22:50 AM

We have to remove the power the current political duopoly has had for generations.

Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote

by LocalH

6/14/2026 at 1:10:07 AM

Hell yeah. And disregard anyone who says you’re “wasting your vote” or “splitting the vote”; they’re part of the problem and their defeatist thinking will get us nowhere.

by donkey_brains

6/13/2026 at 11:00:31 PM

Not voting is much more insulting, by far.

Edit: "civic religion" aha. Sorry, I should have guessed you were trolling. Can't wait to see what kind of revolution you cook up.

by specialist

6/13/2026 at 8:38:16 PM

Civics is a kind of religion, and it is difficult for people caught up in it to approach discussion from a logical and external perspective. This kind of civics is dangerous to society.

by vjulian

6/14/2026 at 1:27:20 AM

Conversely, I think civics where anonymous people tell you voting isn't effective and promote a kind of resentful powerless nihilism is dangerous to society.

Reform is preferable to revolution which is preferable to oppression.

by Sabinus

6/13/2026 at 6:33:24 PM

Violence. But people are still pretty comfortable so here we sit.

by esikich

6/13/2026 at 6:48:22 PM

The actual effective strategy is “tit for tat”

by dmboyd

6/13/2026 at 6:18:27 PM

Making the wealthy scared

by otikik

6/13/2026 at 7:56:55 PM

The other party needs to run better candidates. It’s their job to drive voter turnout in their favor (not internet argument warriors) and they’ve lost two out of the last three elections by sabotaging their own primaries and doing “Our candidate isn’t good but at least they’re not a got dang cheeto!!” campaigns.

“Less bad doesn’t have to mean good” is a mantra with a current 67% loss rate, soon to be 75%, and then 80% four years after that if they keep trying it. And they’ll keep blaming the voters that they failed every time.

by jrflowers

6/13/2026 at 8:00:15 PM

There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity.

The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party.

Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution.

by bobthepanda

6/14/2026 at 1:29:38 AM

Ranked choice voting and the implementation of independent impartial redistricting are very urgently needed reforms.

by Sabinus

6/14/2026 at 3:45:58 AM

I think rather than redistricting in the narrow sense, we should consider

* repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting

by bobthepanda

6/13/2026 at 8:18:42 PM

Eat the rich. Publicly execute billionaires and politicians. Exert The People's unlimited authority over their own government and instil the fear of god into anyone who stands in the way.

by vitally3643

6/13/2026 at 4:25:37 PM

[flagged]

by drnick1

6/13/2026 at 4:28:07 PM

I'm pretty sure they didn't think this through in a comprehensive fashion.

Because making it esy to find all the rich people just seems like a very bad idea given the direction things are going.

When it was broad, the only thing you could do was locate, say, large minority groups. Blacks and latinos for instance. And even that led to problems. I can't imagine what will happen when we can drill down and tease out immigrants from citizens. Gay from straight. Rich from well to do. And so on.

by bilbo0s

6/13/2026 at 5:26:59 PM

Do you really need the census to find people of specific demographics in 2026? Pretty sure I can go up to anyone in any state and ask where all the Puerto Ricans live and get an answer (in many cases I'm sure I'll get stared at like I'm crazy, but that's still an answer). I know because my parents moved to predominantly Hispanic parts of Florida before fully settling down where we landed, I REALLY doubt they stopped to pull up census data to decide where to find Hispanics / Puerto Ricans in Florida. You can talk to any local of any area and figure out which areas are a specific nationality without census data.

by giancarlostoro

6/13/2026 at 7:29:44 PM

>Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now.

Have they maybe thought about IDK, NOT committing terrorist acts if they don't like being labeled as terrorists? Like NOT shooting people in the neck with a sniper rifle or NOT throwing pipe bombs at their political opposition simply because they don't like what they're saying?

It's pretty easy to NOT be a terrorist. Just stop trying to kill people.

by joe_mamba

6/13/2026 at 7:33:21 PM

Bit of a broad brush to be painting with.

by evilsmurf

6/13/2026 at 7:34:45 PM

There's the person who shot CK, and then there's the millions who vocally supported him for doing it (including on HN that dang had to intervene).

Same people are day in day out making death threats to this day. Just check blue sky. Yes, if you make death threats and call to violence then you are a terrorist sympathizer.

by joe_mamba

6/13/2026 at 8:22:23 PM

Good thing that’s been the only act of political violence in America since 2024, otherwise there might be alternative viewpoints.

by peddling-brink

6/13/2026 at 11:06:19 PM

Such as?

by joe_mamba

6/13/2026 at 4:18:11 PM

[flagged]

by throwawa1

6/13/2026 at 4:21:13 PM

How do you get the idea that migration is "planned"? You've lost the plot entirely

by airstrike

6/13/2026 at 4:37:20 PM

Someone must be funding the NGOs organizing it all.

by ptidhomme

6/13/2026 at 4:56:17 PM

George Soros, probably

by airstrike

6/13/2026 at 7:56:28 PM

I wouldn’t be surprised looking at his historical track record of funding NGOs with specific angles and what he said.

by mantas

6/13/2026 at 11:13:21 PM

it was a joke, to be clear

by airstrike

6/14/2026 at 10:29:46 AM

In reality it’s not a joke though. Soros is one of the biggest politically minded donors of the last few decades.

by mantas

6/13/2026 at 8:17:51 PM

The UN literally has a document on their website called "Replacement migration : is it a solution to declining and ageing populations?"

>https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/412547?v=pdf

You can find dozens of clips of politicians and billionaires also talking about the need to replace the low fertility population with immigration.

by Dig1t

6/13/2026 at 9:24:33 PM

Except that has nothing to do with voting which is the claim that was being made

by lkjdsklf

6/13/2026 at 11:10:24 PM

It has everything to do with it. Some will receive amnesty (Reagan did it). Most will have kids, the kids will grow up with a different set of values and they will vote differently than native populations. They will vote outside of the national interest.

I am not talking about Republican or Democrat.

Whether English, Japanese, Australian, American, German, whatever the population being replaced with outsiders. Less unity, less cohesion and subject to whatever the whims of plutocrats may be.

What kind of mad man wants to see an Ireland with Irish? I don't want to live in Mogadishu.

by throwawa1

6/14/2026 at 1:33:33 AM

What would you do about the birth rate? How will you support the boomers retirement?

by Sabinus

6/13/2026 at 5:48:58 PM

[dead]

by vitalyan1234

6/13/2026 at 7:03:43 PM

One example is HIAS who runs a fully staffed Darién Gap facility. As soon as there is a friendly administration to mass migration - they just flip a switch and we will have 10 millions of migrants. I don't want to come across as MAGA, because I am a non voter - the Republicans fuel the fire with forever wars. Its really two sides of the same coin. Companies benefit, because when there is no social cohesion workers are less likely to Unionize.

by throwawa1

6/13/2026 at 7:46:07 PM

"Tens of millions"? Really?

Even if we take 20 million, that's 75% of the total population of Venezuela or half of the population of Colombia. There simply are not enough people in South America for these kinds of numbers.

by cyberax

6/13/2026 at 8:28:59 PM

Chuck Schumer:

>“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants – the Dreamers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,”

Chuck Schumer, who is massively understating the number of illegals here, puts it at at least 11M. So yeah tens of millions is a realistic ballpark.

by Dig1t

6/13/2026 at 9:39:34 PM

That 11M represents decades of migration. It's not getting tripled with the flip of a switch.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 9:53:22 PM

12.2 million Mexicans live in California alone.

by throwawa1

6/13/2026 at 10:05:20 PM

Mexican heritage, yes. Mexican citizenship without US citizenship, very much no.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 11:11:30 PM

And 50 million never bothered to learn English? Here for decades? I have a bridge to sell you Dylan.

by throwawa1

6/13/2026 at 11:51:16 PM

The bridge is that 50 million number that just appeared, yeah. Where did you get that?

Is that the number of people that don't have English as their first language? Almost all of that group does speak English.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 9:51:51 PM

[flagged]

by throwawa1

6/13/2026 at 10:55:19 PM

> There are 45 million Spanish speakers in the United States - in 1950 there were effectively zero.

This is either a bald faced lie or demonstrates an extreme ignorance of history. There have been tons of Spanish speakers in the United States for a loooong time. Before Texas joined the United States, Spanish was an official language, as in 1837 a law was passed to ensure all laws were translated into Castilian.

> Be it resolved, by the senate and house of representatives of the republic of Texas, in congress assembled, That in justice to that numerous portion of our fellow citizens who understand only the Spanish language...

https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45355/m1/99/

You think all these Spanish speakers just disappeared when Texas became a state?

You think there were also no Spanish speakers in the rest of the Western territories? No Spanish speakers left in the parts of Florida Spain originally conquered? No Spanish speakers left at all in the lands that became the state of California or Nevada or New Mexico?

> In 1980 the US was 95% white

More like 80% white. Even in the 1950s the black population was ~10%. If the black population is historically ~10%ish, how is the white population going to be 95% when we also break out other ethnicities? Strange how you're consistently overrepresenting white English speakers in your falsehoods. Interesting pattern you've got there.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_101.20.a...

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/...

> The root of all western Ethnic issues are Zionists.

Ah, I see now. Hunch confirmed. Makes sense about why you tend to lie in a consistent pattern.

by vel0city

6/13/2026 at 11:32:01 PM

[flagged]

by throwawa1

6/14/2026 at 3:07:00 AM

[flagged]

by vel0city

6/13/2026 at 11:23:00 PM

People with a legal right to vote.

by bagels

6/13/2026 at 4:21:09 PM

As planned by whom?

by LPisGood

6/13/2026 at 7:06:57 PM

The Epstein class. Bankers, Zionists who lost their civilization and Temple 2000 years ago:

A good google search to view art owned by one family: "Artist funded by de Rothschild's depicts racial violence and rape themes"

by throwawa1

6/13/2026 at 9:01:43 PM

This take is oversimplified to where it’s literally scary - heres an honest book about the Rothchilds Bankers and Zionists with the additional context I hope you incorporate.

https://ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/historyDEEPWEB/The%...

by poslathian

6/13/2026 at 9:43:34 PM

I've read it. A follow for you could be Jews vs Rome - Netanyahu recommended this with a review: "we lost that one, we won't lose the next one"

Another follow on for you could be the question of the origins of the Slave Trade: Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South - 1789-1865.

The root of all western Ethnic issues are Zionists.

by throwawa1

6/13/2026 at 9:41:43 PM

Telling me some art depicts a bad thing tells me next to nothing about the merits of that art.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 4:46:33 PM

Immigrants don’t get a vote in many countries

For example Europeans were excluded from the Brexit vote

by youngtaff

6/13/2026 at 8:24:08 PM

Voting in these countries takes place largely along ethnic lines.

Go look at maps of "if only X demographic voted", there is a clear incentive for certain parties to import people just because changing the ethnic makeup of the country will give them political power (immigrants have kids who are citizens and will vote along their ethnic lines).

Additionally there are efforts to naturalize refugees and illegals:

Chuck Schumer:

"We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants – the Dreamers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here"

"Path to citizenship" here implies that he wants them to be able to vote.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Schumer-Calls-DREAM-Amnesty

by Dig1t

6/13/2026 at 4:28:53 PM

1.) Migration is constant and big topic.

2.) Democracy happens to be destroyed by local far right movements, composed of people who were there for years and did not migrated anywhere.

The extend of foreign destruction is Vance trying to destroy democracy in Europe openly, Putin doing it secretly and Musk openly enciting pogroms. None of them immigrated to EU.

by watwut

6/13/2026 at 8:00:44 PM

Mainstream parties could take a hard stance on immigration and destroy „far right movements“ overnight. But somehow they are not interested in saving the democracy, instead they prefer to ignore hot topics and pretend they don’t exist. Hmmm, maybe it is this ignorance destroying the democracy?

by mantas

6/13/2026 at 8:32:05 PM

> Mainstream parties could take a hard stance on immigration and destroy „far right movements“ overnight.

No they would not. It would just empower far right to make further demands as everything shifted toward them. And you can even see it practically, each time mainstream parties move toward right, far right becomes stronger. Meanwhile, anti-far-right voters end up without anyone to vote for.

Becoming far right yourself does not cure far right, it makes far right stronger. Far right voters wont vote for you, why would they? And voting for you achieves nothing, you wont oppose far right anyway.

> Hmmm, maybe it is this ignorance destroying the democracy?

No, it is far right who is openly trying to destroy democracy. And helping them wont save the democracy. Blaming mainstream or left for what far-right does also does not help democracy.

by watwut

6/14/2026 at 10:58:33 AM

How come? Mainstream parties are openly ignoring one of the main concerns of a big block of voters. Then some parties start catering for that concern. That’s pure democracy feedback loop in action.

by mantas

6/13/2026 at 4:09:12 PM

Does anyone actually believe this crap?

You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?

You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people?

Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right?

"The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about.

It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now.

by newZWhoDis

6/13/2026 at 4:44:47 PM

You think they wouldn't use every tool available to then, including the census data?

by falsemyrmidon

6/13/2026 at 7:41:43 PM

The census data is probably too stale in most cases to really act on in the way people expect. They used it in the 1940s because that was all they really had. But today it would be stupid to use when you already have backdoors into cell and internet service.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 4:24:31 PM

Yeah okay fair, I was about to post a knee jerk reaction, but it's well known that the US government can obtain higher quality data by just simply buying it from the public market.

by awesomeMilou

6/13/2026 at 7:18:31 PM

> Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google.

Not everybody uses it and not everybody who uses it uses it naively enough to give access to useful identity info.

What's shocking is how people keep finding excuses. "what about Meta" is not one

by ShinyLeftPad

6/13/2026 at 7:43:34 PM

Forget meta. Your cell service providor also gives data to three letter agencies. Your bank does too. Your utility companies. Every thing or concept you might engage with will probably hand over data to three letter agencies. You post on HN after all, I'm sure they do it here too.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 8:46:29 PM

my bank and cell provider and utility company don't ask for my race

anyway let's stop whatabouting:) we are talking about census

by ShinyLeftPad

6/13/2026 at 11:21:14 PM

You think they wouldn't use it? They're using all the things they can get their hands on. The census also has side effects on the franchise.

by bagels

6/13/2026 at 5:58:36 PM

> Does anyone actually believe this crap?

> You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?

I think, and history shows, they would use the tools at their disposal.

Example: https://stateline.org/2026/01/20/ice-is-using-medicaid-data-...

by esseph

6/13/2026 at 7:45:02 PM

That isn't the census. Census data is stale. These data are not stale. If you no longer qualify for medicaid you need to update medicaid office within 10 days for example.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 10:11:30 PM

You act like anybody is actually following that.

by esseph

6/13/2026 at 5:51:54 PM

They haven't done a single thing without malicious intent. Go back and find whatever else you've defended in the past, and look at the results instead of the stated reason/goal for doing them. They won't match. They'll be opposites. You'll rationalize or shift blame, of course. But maybe this time, something decent will get through.

by kgwxd

6/13/2026 at 5:02:22 PM

I'm not sure why your comment is grayed out.

Cell tower data, credit bureau integration, social media scraping, palantir, smart home device surveillance, DNA database exploitation, facial recognition networks, tax, payroll, passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases and many more...

The census is a historical relic used to jerrymander congressional seats, and that's about it.

by willmadden

6/13/2026 at 5:30:34 PM

Census data provides a reliable source to build off of, which makes joining between data sets more reliable. A lot of what you're talking about would be partial prints of an identity that have to be joined up with others to give reliable data.

Eg

> Cell tower data

That's just going to get you a subscriber and device ID, unless you're talking about going deep packet inspection and parsing the contents of the packets. You could, but that's a lot of effort to get something the census can hand you for free.

> credit bureau integration

Notoriously unreliable and identities for the purpose of credit get stolen constantly. The easiest way to clean that is against known-good info, like the census.

> social media scraping

Half the profiles are fake, also not reliable data unless you clean it up. Again, census data makes it very easy to cut out profiles that don't match a real person.

> tax, payroll

These are probably fairly reliable, although they usually won't tell you about a person's demographics.

> passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases

There's an enormous part of the population that won't appear in these at all. The huge part of the country that's "working poor" but not poor enough for Medicaid probably aren't traveling internationally. I wouldn't be surprised if half the country doesn't appear in any of these.

The census has value in that it contains a huge depth of information, is tied with your identity, citizens are compelled by law to answer so even the privacy folks have to respond and lying on it is a crime (enforcement is probably non-existent, though).

I'm sure that can all be reconstructed to some level of accuracy given sufficient effort, but that's a lot harder and requires a ton more coordination than "SELECT * FROM census_data WHERE ..."

by everforward

6/13/2026 at 7:46:51 PM

[dead]

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 11:22:03 PM

It's gray because people downvoted it.

by bagels

6/13/2026 at 4:15:37 PM

I have to agree. I'd like Census data to be private, but the cat is out of the bag.

I'm all for keeping all of this data private. But to think it isn't already available is a bit 'head in sand'. Maybe put laws in place for 'general' privacy across all data, before getting too inflamed about Census in particular.

by FrustratedMonky

6/13/2026 at 5:18:24 PM

[dead]

by sieabahlpark

6/13/2026 at 4:15:09 PM

Even at a quick glance this doesn't make any sense. The census is literally how they get the data. Where else would it come from? Drones? Every computer being hacked Michael Bay style?

by smrtinsert

6/13/2026 at 4:23:03 PM

Data mining companies?

Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.

by cj

6/13/2026 at 5:13:37 PM

I don't work in this industry so I don't know their secret sauce, but I would be surprised if census data is not used as a baseline for what they're selling. It doesn't make sense to not want to use it if your next best sources are relying on everyone in the household having an app that sells their location to your network constantly. I see outdated data about me on the public versions of these sites all the time, so I know they don't have omniscience.

by kajman

6/13/2026 at 6:00:39 PM

It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling.

https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h...

> Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses:

> Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers.

> The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court.

> Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime. Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.

by esseph

6/13/2026 at 6:59:49 PM

I worked for Data company for a year. We absolutely used Census and ACS as baselines and checks. In fact, there was some talk about getting rid of ACS in Congress and we got emails about "EMAIL YOUR CONGRESSIONAL PERSON, DEMAND ACS STAY. Here are talking points."

by stackskipton

6/13/2026 at 6:30:00 PM

I am indeed sworn to not reveal lots of data I knocked on doors for. My memory isn't that good, especially compared to the database it went into, anyway.

I hope it's not a baseline for individual records, but my assumption was that the census data would be pretty useful as a baseline for aggregate information, especially when it comes to comparing to private sets they're working with.

by kajman

6/13/2026 at 7:18:57 PM

You’d be surprised how bad/incomplete the data usually is and how much work it takes to make those datasets really useful or reliable.

That’s one reason Xoom Info was able to sell for a billion dollars and even their data has a lot of junk

Having well curated detailed census data would be a major boon for the data brokers

by SmirkingRevenge

6/13/2026 at 9:46:19 PM

* ZoomInfo

by SmirkingRevenge

6/13/2026 at 9:09:39 PM

> The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data.

Pointing at an example from so long ago to find "the" misuser is turning a blind eye to lots of active misuse.

by Dylan16807

6/13/2026 at 6:05:07 PM

The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level.

Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.

by throwawayffffas

6/13/2026 at 6:18:33 PM

Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.

The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way.

The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.

by elictronic

6/13/2026 at 10:03:52 PM

The whole thing is over noise introduced to publicized documents to disguise the specifics of people in specific addresses, and malicious actors misrepresenting that as fraud.

For example census data was and probably is available on the block level but in order to avoid exposing the data of people living in these blocks that might be a few families, the publicized data aggregated and smoothed the data over blocks so you had cases where a block with a few single family residences reported over 100 people living in them. Obviously certain actors shouted voter fraud over the top of their lungs.

So now the law says no fudging of publicized data to preserver privacy, the government always had the actual accurate data.

The obvious solution to this problem is to just hide the sensitive data instead of fudging them.

In the above example the block would now report 10 people living there, but not their racial, religious, ethnic, or socioeconomic conditions.

by throwawayffffas

6/13/2026 at 9:08:00 PM

> Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.

What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood.

Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?

by AnthonyMouse

6/13/2026 at 9:35:58 PM

How do you show that financial institutions aren't using demographic data unless you have it and run statistical analysis that shows they aren't? Banks aren't the government and can use methods that are illegal for the government to do in order to collect data. Let's say a bank manager is racist in giving out loans, how do you prove it unless you have the data to show it?

by fragmede

6/13/2026 at 10:11:23 PM

How do you know if they are even if you have statistical data? Race correlates with all too many things (e.g. education, income) that affect the default rate, so a statistical disparity is expected as a result of the things that correlate with race and affect defaults even if the loan officer isn't penalizing race at all.

Statistics are doubly useless in that context because a given loan officer might process something like 20 loans a year, which is too small a sample size for statistics to show anything with high confidence anyway.

The way people like that get caught is when they incriminate themselves. And the real way you solve that problem is by ensuring a competitive market for loans, so that the economic inefficiency of not giving loans to people who would pay them back actually negatively impacts the institutions that do it, and the borrowers can find numerous other institutions willing to do business with them, instead of the racist loan officer both being the borrower's only option and their bank not suffering consequences from it because the lack of competition allows them to stay in business by also overcharging the customers they accept.

by AnthonyMouse

6/13/2026 at 6:12:50 PM

There are plenty of other uses - knowing where to build stores to serve your target market, predicting possible pandemic vulnerabilities, etc.

by jmalicki

6/13/2026 at 6:33:04 PM

This might be the point. As long as they think the people who end up under-counted are not people this government would like to have voting power for the House of Representatives.

by ilyagr

6/13/2026 at 7:38:08 PM

The real question is why anyone answers these questions in the first place? I just wait until a census worker shows up and tell them how many people live at my domicile. It's needed for proper electoral representation and absolutely nothing else.

by sidewndr46

6/13/2026 at 5:13:52 PM

This administration does ... not ... care ... about ... facts.

by HumblyTossed

6/13/2026 at 3:48:29 PM

Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.

by tbrownaw

6/13/2026 at 4:02:45 PM

I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective.

Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.

by glenstein

6/13/2026 at 7:11:37 PM

Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.

by michelb

6/13/2026 at 6:10:29 PM

Yes.

Extremists or in general any fraction willing to engage in systematic discrimination, harassment, terrorizing or similar love highly detailed non anonymized census data.

Why?

Because it gives them the perfect layout for which areas to harass (areas likely to yield), which to brutalize (areas unlikely to yield or from especially "hated" people), which to best not touch which (areas with too much influence/money or likely to contain hidden sympathizers), which to systematically take apart through other means like building a highway through them (e.g. "hated" communities to strong/connected to brutalize). etc. etc.

All of this has a lot of history weather it's from right extremists like fascists or left extremists(1).

At which point the question is, if the data you collect is that abuseable. Should you even collect it? Is it even really needed?

(1): Like actual left extremists, the a lot of US sources have the habit to label people as left extremists which by EU standards sometimes aren't even left (but centrist) and very far away from extremism...

by dathinab

6/13/2026 at 9:26:41 PM

The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000

by cwmoore

6/13/2026 at 7:20:22 PM

Then maybe the data shouldn’t be collected in the first place?

by appreciatorBus

6/13/2026 at 6:44:31 PM

It's a census: it's only function is to determine the number of representatives your state should have.

Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion.

Thanks.

by themafia

6/13/2026 at 4:31:18 PM

have you not been paying attention for 10 years? At the top of the rotting snakehead they know all this, they arn't arguing in good faith.

by cyanydeez

6/13/2026 at 4:23:01 PM

You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.

by mc32

6/13/2026 at 4:08:22 PM

>It’s a census: it just asks questions.

Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.

by tokai

6/13/2026 at 5:33:17 PM

There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.

by webnrrd2k

6/13/2026 at 8:43:48 PM

[flagged]

by doh

6/13/2026 at 6:09:28 PM

> they’ll just lie or not answer

The Harper government actively worked on destroying the efficacy of the Canadian census, to make it more difficult for subsequent governments to make data-driven decisions.

In addition to the obvious goal of making it easier to identify and target homosexuals, trans people, minorities, immigrants, it's quite possible that destroying future governments' ability to make good decisions is one of the objectives of the Republican party. Stop voting for the face-eating leopard party, already. They don't use the litterbox, shit everywhere, and actively try to eat your face.

For all the very clever people pointing out that this is nothing new, I have two responses.

1. Your cell company may track your location, and your credit rating agencies know how many nose hairs you have, but they doesn't always (or even usually) have the deeply personal information you're supposed to put down in a census.

2. Enough of a change in degree is a change in kind. If you disagree, remember that Imperial Russia had the Okhrana and sent over a million Sybiraks - prisoners and exiles - to Siberia, and then the fucking CHEKA and the NKVD and then the (kinder, softer, slightly less outright murderous) KGB went ahead to send 18 million people into the GULAG system, and outright murdered half a million to a million. This was all the same, right? No difference?

by vkou

6/13/2026 at 3:31:22 PM

The entity most capable of weaponizing demographic data is the government itself. If people weren’t previously providing false information to the census, I’m skeptical that this change is what will push people over the edge.

by derektank

6/13/2026 at 3:59:01 PM

Congress passed laws that blocked the federal government from fusing data across departments for this specific reason. the admin decided to ignore those, and a friendly congress is deciding to not act on that.

You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.

by notfromhere

6/13/2026 at 4:13:47 PM

Isn't the issue here the lack of accountability? Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt. Ours certainly is and we have a very weak constitution which makes it worse, but that's the US. I think better constitutions are possible, but we have to stop treating it like a sacred document and be practical.

by r14c

6/13/2026 at 4:28:10 PM

> I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt

There's a question of what you mean. Is it, can they be corrupt? have they been corrupt? are they currently corrupt (because of the previous, or incidentally)?

Plato thought Democracy was corrupt and it's the least inherently corrupt system I know of. I would say they are fundamentally corrupt. The best you can do is try to limit it with a document (like the US Constitution) and setting up a multi-branch power structure capable of adversarial action. As you point out, the US does not have that and it's showing.

by Supermancho

6/13/2026 at 3:22:38 PM

> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. Maybe banning it is a way of pretending that the problem doesn't exist, in the hope that it will go away?

Or it's saying that one of these conflicting goals is more valuable than the other, and so shouldn't be sacrificed for it.

by tbrownaw

6/14/2026 at 12:12:07 AM

At the Republican TX state convention this week, they proposed to add wording against differential privacy to their proposed platform via an amendment, justified with an example from someone supposedly involved with the census of how it was common-sense silly because one homeless guy under a bridge can become five via DP. I don't know if it passed, but that's the grassroots push behind things like this.

by eriktrautman

6/14/2026 at 2:04:15 AM

Having worked behind the scenes at a state convention (granted, not in Texas), there is no such thing as grassroots announcements/efforts at those things.

by Loughla

6/14/2026 at 12:18:16 AM

How do you know that's grassroots?

by inigyou

6/13/2026 at 3:52:40 PM

Coming from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble.

"What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .

by Kim_Bruning

6/13/2026 at 4:29:07 PM

Surely any such foreign occupier would just demand the unredacted data?

by Bratmon

6/13/2026 at 6:07:05 PM

Exactly why a government may refrain from collecting such data, as it is not even relevant in any kind of policy decision.

by throwawayffffas

6/14/2026 at 1:07:33 AM

Winner winner. Every piece of data a state forcefully collects and retains should be strictly necessary for an important function and balanced carefully against worst case misuse.

by nullc

6/13/2026 at 6:26:12 PM

What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens.

Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religious data, and it turns out 50% of the population is Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu. So half the population now has to pay a tax, which is effectively a tax on their religion, because their religious belief says they can't eat pork.

This is a made up example, but the point is that you need to know about your citizens so you can make just laws that respect those citizens (and encourage businesses, job training, etc based on demographics). It's why we have a census.

by 0xbadcafebee

6/13/2026 at 7:45:45 PM

Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants.

It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out.

Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly for decision making, even if the intention is good, and the intentions have also been very bad.

by harrall

6/14/2026 at 2:00:08 AM

> It’s not to be used directly for decision making

It was literally introduced for the decision making I mentioned. The US Census was introduced for the reasons of creating better representation for the actual, specific populations in the US.

In 1810, the Census started collecting information on manufacturing and manufactured products, and later agriculture. In 1850, it collected social data, including religious information. It has expanded many times over the years, in order to collect the data needed to more accurately serve the needs of the people. It started counting Native Americans in 1860, stopped counting Slaves in 1870, and started counting Native Americans living on Reservations in 1890. Over the years additional entries have been added as different peoples have immigrated, changes to the country (like the Great Depression), and in 2020 for the first time, questions asking about same-sex couples/spouses/partners.

These questions may seem invasive, but they actually help protect vulnerable people, by showing the number of people who are impacted by the economy, by policy, and more.

by 0xbadcafebee

6/14/2026 at 12:06:24 AM

> Laws aren’t made that way

That's basically exactly how they get made. You don't know anything about the agriculture checkoff in the US, do you?

Every single pound of pork sold or produced in the US sent a tiny amount of it's sale price to the "Pork. The Other White Meat" campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork._The_Other_White_Meat

> laws made that way usually aren’t good.

I don't think anyone said they were good laws.

by mikey_p

6/14/2026 at 2:23:44 AM

what a bizarre comment, of course census data is used for decisionmaking and policy.

by whimsicalism

6/13/2026 at 10:10:42 PM

The government does not need the census to tell it that 50% of the population is of a particular religion, polling like that routinely happens, the census is about voter districts and how many representatives each state gets to elect, the same is true in other democracies as well.

I can think of at least of one European country that does not collect religious, racial and ethnic data during their census. They collect socioeconomic and another but not these. Germany does not do a census at all.

by throwawayffffas

6/14/2026 at 2:25:08 AM

> I can think of at least of one European country that does not collect religious, racial and ethnic data during their census.

Yep, France - and it hides the massive structural racial disparities and makes it all the more difficult for them to redress (not that they appear to really care to, France is one of the more racist western european countries).

by whimsicalism

6/13/2026 at 7:44:07 PM

Surely you know the history being referenced here.

by adastra22

6/13/2026 at 6:02:44 PM

That's where you hope people like Rene Carmille are around. S

by iso1631

6/13/2026 at 5:39:38 PM

Yes, which is why the government shouldn't have this data at all in the first place.

by gambiting

6/13/2026 at 5:50:16 PM

Say you get your way, and, for fear of Mark Carney rolling the tanks in and taking over North America, the US stops collecting any data on its citizens. How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not? Data privacy is a real concern, but you need PII to run government services effectively. Running a state without collecting PII is like running a hospital without collecting any.

by monitorlizard

6/13/2026 at 5:55:50 PM

> How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not?

How does knowing your religious affiliation help them with any of this?

by AlecSchueler

6/13/2026 at 6:01:02 PM

"Collecting data" is what helps them.

by LoganDark

6/13/2026 at 6:00:07 PM

They should follow the principle of least privilege. Why not use differential privacy?

by dwaltrip

6/13/2026 at 6:27:15 PM

I don't know why you understood my comment as saying government shouldn't have any data. I specifically replied to the comment about religion - there's no reason for the government to collect any data about that from individuals. Churches can report how many members they have if they want to. But it shouldn't be a question on the census.

by gambiting

6/13/2026 at 7:55:56 PM

They don't ask about religious affiliation on the census.

1. How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2020?

2. Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2020 that you did not include in Question 1?

3. Is this house, apartment, or mobile home?

4. What is your telephone number?

5. What is Person 1’s name?

6. What is Person 1’s sex?

7. What is Person 1’s age and what is Person 1’s date of birth?

8. Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?

9. What is Person 1’s race?

Nothing really stops you from lying either.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 8:13:33 PM

Right, but the entire damn point is privacy protections enable people to be more honest. The entire point is supposed to be good data so we can make informed population wide decisions.

And race is a pretty big one under the current administration which has had hundreds of legal immigrants arrested for weeks to months off of "suspicion" that for lack of concrete evidence could only amount to racial profiling.

by kmacdough

6/13/2026 at 8:22:10 PM

Administration doesn't care about race, but conservative in groups and liberal out groups. Race is a sort of proxy drumbbeat to appease the most stupid of their base. This is why people like Marco Rubio or Scott Turner are part of the in group despite the seeming cognitive dissonance there. There are a shocking number of black and latino people in this country who do in fact support this regime. There are gay republicans. Muslim republicans. All of this is tolerated by the in group if they are ideologically conservative.

You know how you target best based on ideology? Not the damn census. Social media. What you post, who you follow, all of that stuff we forgot that ICE was getting from travelers at the border imaging their cellphone. That stuff is far more accurate to what you are today, right now, at this minute, and where you fall in light of this regime, and what risk you present to the state and its power structures.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 5:17:55 PM

France used to make plenty of lists. We loved lists. Lists are good. Jews lists? Sure, it's maybe useful one day when we want to do something.

Boy were the Germans happy to find these.

The American obsession with asking for people their perceived origins (AAPI, AA, Latino, ...) is more than weird: it's downright dangerous. Don't fucking ask these questions, and never, ever write it down, especially not with names.

Thankfully, now they can just buy it from data brokers and let Palantir target, so that makes life easier for them

by well_ackshually

6/14/2026 at 2:29:27 AM

France knows very little about managing a post-colonial multiracial society (except for terribly), I would appreciate if y'all listened and learned or at least approached the issue with more humility. France has serious racial, colonial, Muslim, immigrant, and banlieue inequalities, but its refusal to officially measure race/ethnicity makes those inequalities harder to see, litigate, quantify, or remedy.

by whimsicalism

6/14/2026 at 7:22:27 AM

Considering the last time we made lists of people's origins, it was used by the nazis and that there's a chance for the neonazis in 2027: no, thank you.

Knowing someone is algerian, muslim or black doesn't help you fix inequalities. It doesn't help in the US, or anywhere else in the world. Racial statistics are useless. We know where poverty is.

by well_ackshually

6/13/2026 at 4:25:03 PM

"What is your religious affiliation" makes absolutely no sense in a census exercise. IMO.

by Rygian

6/13/2026 at 4:37:38 PM

The U.S. Census Bureau collects tons of data unrelated to the decennial counting for Congressional apportionment.

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys.html

The American Community Survey is the most well-known, as it replaced the “long form” sampling that had been an extension to the Census.

by twoodfin

6/13/2026 at 4:37:19 PM

Unless you’re a government explicitly and openly aligned with Christian nationalists.

by yoyohello13

6/13/2026 at 4:53:53 PM

The point might be going over my head… why does it make no sense?

by talon8635

6/13/2026 at 8:01:01 PM

The United States are listed as a secular state (ie. it "is or purports to be officially neutral in matters of religion")

Edit: As I research a bit further, I have stumbled upon an interesting counterargument [1] that enumeration of ethnicity and ethnic groups results in "more political discrimination and state-sponsored violence targeting ethnic groups". Perhaps a similar conclusion could be reached about religious census information.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2...

by Rygian

6/13/2026 at 6:01:02 PM

why it makes sense? please try to answer. what action of the gov would change based on that data?

then, make it so your answer is more valid than if they asked what you usually have for breakfast.

i guarantee you more gov actions can be positively impacted by the breakfast question than the religion one.

the ONLY use for religious data is to get it for free for campaigns.

by iririririr

6/13/2026 at 6:22:26 PM

Isn’t religion, for those who follow it (I don’t), one of if not the most important aspects of their identity and life’s purpose? I love breakfast food, but not that much.

Don’t some religions not get along very well?

Given your criteria, what should be asked? Check the boxes for the physical and mental illnesses you have? What’s your BMI? How much time do you spend online? What percent of your diet is highly processed foods?

Is gender/sex also nonsensical? Is languages spoken also nonsensical?

by talon8635

6/13/2026 at 7:47:15 PM

They are asking what policy decisions hinge on that religion question. Given 1st amendment protections against government policy that favors one religion over another, I think that’s a fair question to ask.

by adastra22

6/13/2026 at 8:39:22 PM

If there is less than 50% religious people maybe the "in god we trust" could be removed from the dollar?

Also are you sure there isnt less than 50% religious people already?

by rvba

6/13/2026 at 4:53:23 PM

It actually does. Religious affinity can absolutely be useful for longer trend studies, and census data is usually of much, much higher quality than other random sample studies.

by mschuster91

6/13/2026 at 8:18:27 PM

With that perspective, how do you prevent scope creep when preparing a census exercise? You would collect everything and the shape of each house's kitchen sink, because "it can be useful".

by Rygian

6/13/2026 at 9:46:39 PM

Generally, by looking at what other nations do, what academia asks of us, and what studies are being undertaken by academia.

by mschuster91

6/13/2026 at 4:54:58 PM

Asking about your religion on the census is against the law in the US:

no person shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.

https://www.congress.gov/94/statute/STATUTE-90/STATUTE-90-Pg...

by WillPostForFood

6/13/2026 at 5:04:05 PM

> compelled

Doesn't that mean they can ask that question with an option for "rather not disclose"?

by swsieber

6/13/2026 at 7:57:42 PM

You can look at the sample form for 2020 census and you will find it is not on there.

by asdff

6/13/2026 at 5:05:17 PM

Religion is just an example. Don't dwell on it.

by petilon

6/13/2026 at 7:24:59 PM

> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore.

I think he has it backwards here.

Techniques like differential privacy hide the fact that a trade-off exists, except for a small cadre of experts who live and breathe this stuff.

I don’t know enough to defend this decision, but it strikes me that if there is a real trade-off, not having access to these techniques will force people other than statisticians to confront the trade-off.

If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.

by appreciatorBus

6/13/2026 at 10:06:56 PM

Nope private data about people is published unintentionally regularly, Netflix history and medical records being some of the notable examples.

People are bad at making the tradeoff because they consistently underestimate the amount of information that is leaked. Forcing them to leak safe amounts of information is the right way.

Not sharing or collecting the data could in some cases be better but there is clear value in this data so the optimal amount to store and make public is not 0.

by shiandow

6/13/2026 at 11:38:40 PM

I think the real killer is that every knows their data has been leaked six times over, and yet nothing bad has come of it for 99% of people.

If there was an apocalyptic privacy breach that lead to 40% of the population losing their savings, people would be smashing their smart TVs in the streets a day later.

But alas, nothing bad actually manifests (besides the suspicious ads that know you really like Tide detergent).

by WarmWash

6/13/2026 at 10:20:56 PM

imho, one big reason why Data Science as a big org lost clout in tech companies was a tendency to treat DS as gatekeepers of data. Outsourcing the responsibility of stat thinking gave many DS a weird power trip; when one dude gets to decide the trade-offs first without anyone around them needing to understand properly.

by hitekker

6/13/2026 at 9:10:10 PM

> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.

By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible.

How could you receive your mail in a world where we never give out/collect info that is potentially hazardous?

by Forgeties79

6/13/2026 at 10:41:45 PM

Name, address, and phone number served plenty of critical functions when they were published in the White Pages. Cell phones not being listed there was kind of an accident of history. It was common to call a listed landline and be given or forwarded to a cell number. Only after most people stopped having landlines altogether did a phone number come to be considered sensitive information (unless you were a celebrity or something).

Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.

by closeparen

6/13/2026 at 11:05:45 PM

It would entirely be possible to limit the scope of things, by making sure the company that has your address (UPS or USPS, say) never has the other information. Each business would hand off a zero-knowledge identifier to you that you'd give to the others: Amazon would only know that the payment identifier they gave to you was fulfilled at VISA somehow, and then hand the package off to UPS with an identifier that they would never see again.

by bombcar

6/14/2026 at 1:44:38 AM

This is silly.

An argument about whether or not to deploy differential privacy on large statistical databases has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you give your address to have a package delivered. If you want the package delivered, you have to give your address.

On the other hand, it’s not at all clear that people should have to involuntarily, my force of law, offer up all sorts of personal details about their lives. And questions about whether the use of differential privacy can or should justify the collection of sensitive information are quite valid.

The census is justified by the idea that it will help us plan for the future. But the track record of central planning is poor to disastrous.

A small example: in theory population changes could inform land use decisions. In practice however, the ability of population to increase is softly capped by the amount of housing that exists, or will exist. If you restrict or frustrate housing, you will also restrict people from living where they want to live. Then the planners will point to the census data and tell you that nobody wants to live there and therefore there’s no need for change.

Ironically, if you wanted to measure where people want to live in order to get information for planning purposes, the number is right there and doesn’t require any personal data collection at all - it’s the price. (in this example $ per square foot of floor space). But in my experience people who like central planning don’t believe in prices so they ignore that and they look at their reams of personal data and they conclude that all is well in the world. It is hard for me to be sympathetic if one day folks like that had have less data to look at.

by appreciatorBus

6/14/2026 at 6:39:56 AM

It’s not silly. I’m responding to this:

> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.

We agree that doxxing is dangerous online yes? Your point about the white pages is exactly what I’m talking about. A piece of data isn’t inherently dangerous or not dangerous. It’s about context and ease of access by actors with various intentions.

by Forgeties79

6/13/2026 at 4:29:36 PM

Can anyone explain to me the previous state and why it was desirable? I admittedly do not understand why people are getting riled up. I am not being difficult. I really don't understand the original state and the changed state here.

by iugtmkbdfil834

6/14/2026 at 5:29:47 AM

Amazing how the current US gov is finding every different way to destroy the country from every aspect every single day.

by mikkkee

6/14/2026 at 9:49:45 AM

Sounds like a great way to prevent finding irregularities

by khalic

6/13/2026 at 9:23:58 PM

I know it is off topic, and the issues raised here are fairly profound, but I want to share the conformed idea of “Noise infusion banned for industries regulated by the FCC”

by cwmoore

6/13/2026 at 3:55:36 PM

Can anyone share how other countries handle this?

by lokar

6/13/2026 at 4:02:25 PM

A lot of countries are really bad at running their census. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-governments-cant-count

by simonw

6/13/2026 at 4:52:13 PM

And a lot of countries have things like national IDs that, rightly or wrongly, given things like RealID and passports, that a lot of Americans just don't like on principle.

by ghaff

6/13/2026 at 4:58:44 PM

Sure, in Europe we don't because we already have databases of all citizens, also recording attributes like race, skin color, religious affiliation or political leaning in a database is highly illegal, both for the government and for private use.

by pelorat

6/13/2026 at 5:50:33 PM

Wait, are you saying Europe doesn't have censuses?

by throw-the-towel

6/13/2026 at 6:35:10 PM

In my European country (Switzerland), it's mandatory to notify the government whenever you move. There is thus no universal census and also no voter registration. There's still subsampled surveys though, for e.g. economic data, that might come by mail (addressed to you by name, because they know where you live!).

by brainwad

6/13/2026 at 7:22:03 PM

Just like in the USSR

by drysine

6/13/2026 at 7:43:56 PM

Perhaps on that one axis. On the other hand Switzerland is probably about as far opposed as the USSR as you can get.

by Peanuts99

6/13/2026 at 7:39:28 PM

As I understand it, in the Soviet Union you had to get government permission before moving. Whereas here the right to move is guaranteed, you just have to update your details.

by brainwad

6/14/2026 at 6:50:52 AM

You are right, I apologize

What's the fine for not registering your move? What time do you have to update your location?

In Russia in the 90s we had 5 days and now it's three months. The fine is 3000 rubles (~40 euro) and zero if you moved in the same region (most of them are bigger than Switzerland:) or live at relative's or spouse's place

I used to think that what we have in Russia is Soviet legacy (albeit relaxed) and it's something people in Europe are not burdened with

by drysine

6/14/2026 at 11:52:31 AM

Usually 14 days and ~50-200 CHF. But you can usually do it online now, so it's trivial.

by brainwad

6/13/2026 at 6:16:37 PM

Many countries effectively have a live registry of where people live, updated to within a few weeks. A door to door census isn’t needed because they can do something like:

SELECT a.province, COUNT(DISTINCT b.id_num) FROM registry a INNER JOIN national_id b ON a.nat_id_num = b.id_num WHERE timeframe = 2026-01-01 GROUP BY 1

by generj

6/13/2026 at 6:20:17 PM

Correct. At least, not that I know of. On the other hand, when you move, you must deregister with your old municipality and register with your new one. The exact system differs a bit per country.

by gpvos

6/13/2026 at 8:35:50 PM

> recording attributes like race, skin color,

The only reason we ever started doing this was to track ex-slaves and their descendants, and after-1965 every other possible grouping of people started begging for a category that it could use to get government grants in some way.

The irony is that now, when censuses somehow desperately need to figure out if you're Armenian or not, they don't count the descendants of slaves at all, preferring to lump them in with every dark-skinned person of partial African descent, but sometimes not the Spanish speakers(?!).

The US Supreme Court made a good decision (on admissions, not on the need for the approval of redistricting maps in places that have continuously attacked slave and Jim Crow descended voters.) The government needs to get out of the race and religious science business. Elected and appointed officials are openly claiming jihadi eschatology as the reason that they're supporting Israel, and openly explaining how the culturally varied mix of people who happened to live in land that Zionists wanted, or the Chinese, are inhuman races that are a threat because of their inhuman behavior and their inhuman values. We've woven church and race deeply into the government again.

The idea that preferential admissions to elite schools was going to somehow offset slavery was laughable anyway. It was just a grievance engine that gave people on top an excuse to feel downtrodden during the one of the most and the first vulnerable times in their lives - when they find out they're too stupid or boring to get into the college they want. I've always been partial to the libertarian solution to the problem of US slavery - Murray Rothbard and others said that according to the Libertarian homesteading principle, slaves should have been awarded the land and the factories that they worked. That it was an injustice that would lead to (what was in his view) catastrophe, such as how the freeing of Russian serfs in 1861 without any of the land still controlled by their ex-masters led to the Russian Revolution 50 years later.

by pessimizer

6/14/2026 at 7:13:25 AM

> The only reason we ever started doing this was to track ex-slaves and their descendants, and after-1965 every other possible grouping of people started begging for a category that it could use to get government grants in some way.

Both of these comments need citations. The first I can maybe buy but the second is harder to accept without proof.

by Forgeties79

6/13/2026 at 7:57:03 PM

> Maybe the goal is to force the U.S. Census to publish statistics that actually enable re-identification, to help with future gerrymandering efforts?

In case you were wondering why the government would do this, yes, that's exactly why.

by firejake308

6/13/2026 at 4:35:10 PM

I think it should be noted that there was a lot of dissatisfaction from users of the census data as far as I know. So it's not been banned just for politicals sake or because they hate privacy... Some people I talked to in the privacy field even called the whole thing a total disaster and weren't shy to put blame on John Abowd who apparently pushed this through despite a lot of internal opposition and concerns. Not sure if that's true, but what is definitely true is that the way the data was released produced serious issues downstream as most researchers and statisticians that ingested the data weren't prepared for receiving noisy data values. Differential privacy was applied in a way such that many invariants that data users cared about weren't preserved, which was expected as it's not possible as you can't preserve all invariants and at the same time add meaningful noise to the data. The thing is, with such a differentially private data release you need to adapt all of the downstream analyses to take into account the exact mechanism the data was altered in. And since the census bureau used a very intricate mechanism that didn't just add Laplace noise to data values but instead relied on a multi-stage process that preserved some invariants but not others it was very difficult to even write routines to account for the changes being made to the data. They essentially asked of every data user to rewrite their whole analysis pipeline based on the exact disclosure mechanism that contained a large number of bespoke choices regarding which data invariants to preserve and basically produced a mix of noisy, synthesized data that was just really hard to reason about. I don't even know if there even would've been a way to do this better, but the fact is that not every small county or school district has top-tier statisticians at hand that can just read a whole monograph on differentially private synthesized census data and then hotpatch their existing analysis systems to work with that data.

I was a big fan of differential privacy but now I think it might be doing more harm than good, as I haven't seen a single case where it was applied successfully in a problem where it actually mattered, and it contributed strongly to discrediting and preventing a lot of work on other anonymization techniques as it was deemed the only way to preserve privacy by the research community, so showing up with enhancements to k-anonymity or any other noise mechanism not rooted in it was a sure way to get ridiculed and ignored. And it's just not a practical mechanism, even when it works for a single disclosure you always end up having to blow up the privacy budget to a ridiculous amount in order to keep disclosing statistics as otherwise you would for almost all real-world data run out of budget after a few publications.

So, for me it's a technique that works in the areas where it doesn't really matter (publishing highly aggregated statistics that pose almost zero privacy risk even without differential privacy) and doesn't work in other areas where it would actually matter (publishing fine-grained data about individuals or small groups). There are some niche use cases but in my view the privacy community has really overblown the importance of differential privacy by portraying it as the only way to reliably anonymize data.

BTW the German census bureau has an interesting approach to anonymization which they use for several decades already and so far I haven't heard of any cases of successful de-anonymization of the data, maybe the US bureau should have a look at that for their own needs.

by ThePhysicist

6/13/2026 at 5:37:23 PM

Of course there will be dissatisfaction from users of the data. Anyone that wants to use census data will prefer less privacy in the data. And anytime privacy is enforced the data becomes less useful. It would be certainly very convenient for both advertisers and gerrymandering political consultants to have detailed data on every citizen.

As the article says anytime you want to enforce privacy, the data becomes somewhat less useful, there is just no way around that.

The point of rights is that we have them and that they should not be trampled upon when they become slightly inconvenient to someone in power.

by hristov

6/13/2026 at 6:09:10 PM

Are you sure about that? You are saying that differentially private census data couldn't be used for gerrymeandering and advertisement while non differentially private data could? Hard to believe, I'm not an advertisement or gerrymeandering expert but I would assume people running ads or cutting up districts are mostly interested in aggregate statistics i.e. they won't care about single households? And I would assume they can rely on voter files, party databases etc... And to the contrary there are reports [1] that indicate differential privacy actually makes gerrymeandering analysis more difficult or impossible. So, not really an argument for differential privacy, discriminatory action can be equally well taken based on differentially private data as the government cares about groups not individuals and groups aren't protected by differential privacy. It seems people really fundamentally misunderstand what this technique can achieve and what it won't do.

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8494446/?utm_source...

by ThePhysicist

6/13/2026 at 8:51:31 PM

> You are saying that differentially private census data couldn't be used for gerrymeandering and advertisement while non differentially private data could?

They definitely didn't say that. You said that. And you said that because you would prefer to argue impossibility vs. possibility rather than more useful vs. less useful. You prefer this because for the first irrelevant question which no one asked (it is possible to use current census data in bad ways), you are obviously right; and for the second, relevant question (would allowing this data make it easier and far more useful for gerrymandering and advertisement), you are obviously wrong.

by pessimizer

6/13/2026 at 10:20:03 PM

> for the second, relevant question (would allowing this data make it easier and far more useful for gerrymandering and advertisement), you are obviously wrong.

Really? Why? When has gerrymandering ever relied on identifying individuals? Have any advertisers ever tried to use census data to identify individuals? That strikes me as highly unlikely - they are gonna use Facebook and Google, not some government database they’d have to deanonymise.

by dash2

6/13/2026 at 4:41:33 PM

> serious issues downstream as most researchers and statisticians that ingested the data weren't prepared for receiving noisy data values

They weren't prepared for data that was obviously noisy. The data has always been inherently inaccurate, and folks just chose to ignore that previously

by swiftcoder

6/13/2026 at 4:51:10 PM

No, there are dozens of articles discussing the mechanism and explaining the impact it had in different areas e.g. [1,2,3]. And the release mechanism wasn't just "add noise", far from it, you may read the original paper [4] to see how intricate it was, anyone wanting to make real use the resulting data would have needed to understand that approach in detail to work with the resulting data. The report of the national academies [3] is probably the most comprehensive analysis of the mechanism and the complications it introduced, so writing "it has always been inherently inaccurate" is just wrong, this new mechanism was way worse than just introducing unbiased sampling noise.

1: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fpandp.20191107&... 2: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk3283?utm_sourc... 3: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27150/chapter/14

4: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/7evz361i/release/2

by ThePhysicist

6/13/2026 at 7:48:38 PM

Tax info, criminal records, licenses, identification, and ownership, should be the only records. Census data is profiling, and that never ends well.

by chickensong

6/13/2026 at 4:33:05 PM

I guess this could be implemented externally.

Eg via some app that instructs respondents to enter a specific answer in a pseudorandomly chosen question.

Of course security would be another question.

by thih9

6/14/2026 at 12:33:45 AM

This is why for the census my forms said that I was a poor widow from Kazakhstan with 9 chidren , no education and an adherent of the Mandean faith.

Never ever provide true information in any form.

by GreenSalem

6/13/2026 at 5:49:39 PM

So "differential privacy" pretty much sounds like someone gets to modify the results of a census and how it gets modified is entirely up to their discretion.

Seems like something that could be abused to achieve political objectives.

by sherburt3

6/14/2026 at 12:22:15 PM

The replacement will be more or less similar to the pre-1990 bin-dropping, where the government will just not report on too-small slices (read, almost definitionally: minorities). Which is also politically biased, in a different way.

by brainwad

6/13/2026 at 6:37:10 PM

there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous. the changes don't affect the final aggregates significantly, just enough to avoid saying much *about any individual person*.

know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thing.

If someone actually wanted to achieve political objectives by tampering with census data, there are better means than tampering with homogeneous statistical fuzzing.

by nirava

6/13/2026 at 7:47:29 PM

>there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous

I hope so. What are they?

by CGMthrowaway

6/13/2026 at 6:48:46 PM

Not really, it has to be random in a predetermined fashion to be considered differential privacy. It is reversible in the way that someone shouting over an aicraft producing white noise is intelligible.

I guess someone could fiddle with the noise, but then why not nudge the originals? Or more insidiously, control what is published?

by shiandow

6/13/2026 at 9:26:17 PM

If someone modified the original dataset and it was discovered they would be held accountable. However if you have a departmental policy of modifying the data for "privacy reasons" and it just so happened to surrepititiously affect some sort of political outcome then ah geez that just a wacky coincidence not any individuals fault.

by sherburt3

6/13/2026 at 9:41:09 PM

You shouldn't base political decisions on stuff that falls within the margin of error.

Anyway you either ensure any analysis is reproducible or not, if adding noise is one of the steps just make sure to fix the seed.

by shiandow

6/13/2026 at 3:30:43 PM

The better to sell the data, all your privates are belong to us.

by watersb

6/13/2026 at 6:19:27 PM

Any privacy-diminishing changes at federal level happening during this administration are for one reason only: to amass more power in Conservative administration/governance. At the federal level it's Project 2025, at the state level it's making sure states stay red and disenfranchise minorities.

by 0xbadcafebee

6/13/2026 at 4:20:49 PM

The fines for non-compliance are low enough to remain silent.

Do. The American Census Survey (randomly-selected long-form questionairre) is dangerously overinvasive.

by ProllyInfamous

6/13/2026 at 6:42:19 PM

This is a rare occasion of the Trump administration getting something right.

Why even do a census if you're just going to synthesize random data as the last step?

by Bratmon

6/13/2026 at 5:14:59 PM

I really have to take the anti-noise side here. I get why it's a hard problem, and I get why the Census Bureau thought this was a neat solution. But I'm imagining an accountant stepping through a similar chain of logic:

* I want to accurately report the finances of our company to the best of my ability.

* But that report would allow people to reconstruct private data about the terms of our contracts with various counterparties. I'd really like to avoid that, there's no rule that says we're supposed to release that data. In fact some of those contracts probably came with nondisclosure agreements!

* So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to calculate our results to the best of my ability, and then I'm going to add random values to them and report only the randomized ones. Any reconstruction people try to do will be wrong because of the randomness.

* If the SEC says "no, you need to report your actual numbers", I will explain to them that there's no such thing as an actual number because all data is noisy.

I can't get behind it.

by SpicyLemonZest

6/14/2026 at 1:01:35 AM

Applying subjectivity to what they keep and where it's bound, implies that this was always an expression of opinion.

Science intrinsically ignores opinions.

The officials responsible for this smearing of data should be tried. This was a violation of the free speech clause as it coercively manipulated public beliefs. This was a crime against science and civil rights.

by trimethylpurine

6/13/2026 at 3:18:13 PM

The dueling political demands of accuracy and privacy are simply incompatible at some level. After reading this, maybe Hanlon's Razor isn't the right standard. Besides malice and stupidity, there is impossibility. Some problems just aren't solvable under certain constraints. I don't envy the statisticians tasked with finding a politically palatable solution to a math problem.

by delichon

6/13/2026 at 3:31:13 PM

But the strength of differential privacy is that you can now make this tradeoff explicit and quantify it. I always liked it because it offers a mathematical solution to a policy problem, but then of course it's up to us to decide what parameters and tradeoff to choose. Also, some data might just not get published at all if the privacy implications are too problematic, so differential privacy might buy you more signal!

by Sol-

6/13/2026 at 4:05:45 PM

Yeah, the main issue with differential privacy is that you need competent government officials making decisions who understand math beyond a high school level.

by thatfrenchguy

6/13/2026 at 3:39:48 PM

It offers a mathematical description of a policy tradeoff, and the policy makers are apparently setting one of the parameters to zero.

by tbrownaw

6/13/2026 at 3:26:19 PM

There's a ton of information in the US that is accessible to various degrees--especially through the the deep web much less background investigations. Unless you're a wealthy person who can set up various levels of trusts you can't really hide them.

You can of course disagree about what what should actually be part of a transparent public record. (Though I suspect a lot of people post-date what was generally available in a "phone book.")

by ghaff

6/13/2026 at 7:58:00 PM

I have filled out census forms in the past and it was not a big imposition. During the last census I had supposed census workers showing up at my home multiple times and pushily asking for an in person interview. I told the guy that came initially that I was not interested as I had a full time job, a 5 year old, and newborn twins. He brazenly said “your wife can do it” with zero consideration that she was just cut open weeks prior. A couple weeks later he shows up again at like 7pm pounding on the door right in the middle of the kids bedtime routine. I told him it was a really unwelcome visit and sent him on his way. A couple weeks later a car comes rolling up to the house on a Saturday and the woman driving tells me she is the guys supervisor and they really want the interview. I explained to her the situation, the newborn babies, the previous encounters, etc. she seemed completely undeterred and just went right back to pestering. I told her if anybody from the census came back they should go ahead and bring the sheriff because I’d be calling for trespassing. They finally stopped bothering me.

by mberning

6/13/2026 at 7:40:02 PM

I was going to build something cool with fable, and now it's banned, feeling disappointed

by thisisaman408

6/13/2026 at 3:30:28 PM

Stalin's demographic researchers kept disappearing until they came up with the numbers he wanted.

by wnc3141

6/13/2026 at 10:40:14 PM

roschdal

by roschdal

6/13/2026 at 9:41:00 PM

The arguments im seeing in here are that census data will lead to a literal holocaust. Histrionic. Makes it seem like this policy was a no brainer

by oklahomasports

6/13/2026 at 4:32:51 PM

if you want to keep your sanity, I suggest silently adding the phrase

     "...for the next 950 days"
every time you read some politically spiteful news like this

because the next two years are going to become insanely miserable

by ck2

6/13/2026 at 5:03:08 PM

It’s highly uncertain what will happen in 950 days.

by layer8

6/13/2026 at 9:12:31 PM

I think it's easy to predict some things that will happen in 950 days

in 950 days there will be several hundred warehouses concentrating over a million people in this country including many thousands of children costing a quarter trillion dollars (already funded)

and the Iran War will still be happening despite over a hundred declared "deals"

and the US will be running Cuba (forcing millions to return there)

statistical noise or the lack of it will be the least of our problems

by ck2

6/13/2026 at 4:35:49 PM

i think they will use ai as a leverage card to other country to order them

by zkzk_gamal

6/13/2026 at 5:19:10 PM

But why?? Differential privacy works? It's not even "woke" or whatever these people perceive. It's just math man...

by mikelitoris

6/13/2026 at 4:41:09 PM

Data shall set you free... or not

by yegortk

6/13/2026 at 3:20:19 PM

This is a gift to reactionary gerrymandering and voting restriction efforts, along with things like yesterday's FBI raid of an Ohio voting rights organization.

https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-06-12/ohi...

Representative Joyce Beatty is from Ohio and was instrumental in stopping Trump from illegally renaming the Kennedy Center.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/kennedy-center-b...

by xenophonf

6/13/2026 at 3:39:58 PM

Representative Beatty serves her own interests and her involvement Kennedy Center naming was just more of the same performative politics she routinely engages in. She's on the verge of being an octogenarian and missed a number of key votes, like the bill that cut funding to NPR, PBS, and other govt. programs. Kudos to her for working to remove Trump's name from the Kennedy Center but she needs to go.

by thepryz

6/13/2026 at 4:12:48 PM

The removal of his name is not performative since we're in the thick of a cult of personality president (at a bare minimum).

by smrtinsert

6/13/2026 at 10:19:47 PM

Yet another thing this admin is screwing up. News at 11. Let’s fix this in the midterms by voting out the republicans. That’s it. That should be the sum total of the platform: not republican and not crazy.

by gigatexal

6/13/2026 at 11:09:48 PM

[flagged]

by fauria

6/13/2026 at 4:34:00 PM

[dead]

by ofcyes

6/13/2026 at 5:55:01 PM

Census data is extremely powerful. It's why some states lost house seats and why some gained house seats.

It must therefore be maximally transparent. Do you want president Trump or palantir to decide on the "noise infusion" algorithm?

by declan_roberts

6/13/2026 at 6:20:12 PM

headcount doesn't have to be granular, it has to be accurate. this is about the very useful street- and block-level data.

also, if how would anyone know how accurate the "transparent" number is? if Trump or Thiel can fuck with the fuzzing they can just as do so with the base data.

by pas

6/13/2026 at 3:14:42 PM

Frankly i see no reason to keep this data private. They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc...

Fundamentally this is public data. If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is.

There are very few things that the state has data on that should not be made public. Census data is simply not one of those things.

publishing should be the default for any data, and to keep it unpublished should require substantially good reasons that impact the country as a whole. Frankly, if it isn't detailed national defence plans, i struggle to see any data that should not be public.

by Pragmata

6/13/2026 at 3:19:55 PM

How hard have you thought about this?

The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions.

A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home.

If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe for people to respond to as possible.

Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.

by simonw

6/13/2026 at 4:05:31 PM

> Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.

I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.

Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.

by wpollock

6/13/2026 at 4:29:32 PM

>And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.

There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.

The last thing people should support is creating of profiles of individuals by combining data from different government agencies. This is why the census is so important as a data collection mechanism.

by nojito

6/13/2026 at 5:33:43 PM

> There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.

This is an excellent point. In my opinion, such laws are a good idea. Most of the time, policy decisions should not require IRS data. (Or other personal data.)

But to get around such laws, the government asks citizens to provide that data a second time (in the census). And sometimes it's asked yet again on other forms. This seems to defeat the purpose of those laws.

I can see that federal disaster aid might need to know if some area needs more or less aid, depending on the wealth of the area receiving aid. If aid is given to individuals, the have a need to know the individuals' income.

When there is a reasonable need to know, I would prefer the government use the much more accurate IRS data, rather than ask for people's income multiple times. The laws preventing merging federal datasets could be rethought, given what is now known about preserving privacy mathematically. I would like to see specific exemptions made, with the provided data properly anonymized to preserve privacy while serving the legitimate purpose for which the data was requested. The use of such data should require a request to congress for it.

by wpollock

6/13/2026 at 3:25:49 PM

This seems’s like an issue created by congress. the constitution only requires a headcount by state. Maybe they should use another mechanism to collect demographic data. Since the concern is not about representation, but allocation, tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.

by jonhohle

6/13/2026 at 3:55:59 PM

I don't think the question "Has this person given birth to any children in the past 12 months?" would look good on a tax return.

by simonw

6/13/2026 at 7:46:13 PM

Isn't that already on the tax return? Your dependent count would increment from the prior year. The IRS can also distinguish births vs adoptions and step children by the checking for novel SSNs.

by arbot360

6/13/2026 at 6:45:57 PM

My home country pays a baby bonus to people and it's administered via the tax system, so I think we ask something very similar actually.

by brainwad

6/13/2026 at 7:42:05 PM

Have you filled out a federal income tax return in the US?

It absolutely asks for the names (and SSN) of any dependents. It's trivial to infer whether one of the adult(s) filing the tax return gave birth in the last 12 months based on the last 2 years of tax returns for those adult(s).

by bpt3

6/14/2026 at 12:06:06 AM

> tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.

Plenty of people don’t file tax returns (legally even, there’s a minimum income threshold).

by happyopossum

6/13/2026 at 3:30:55 PM

The census isn't for helping the country make any decisions other than determining the number of representatives and apportionment of taxes. It should not be collecting any data that isn't necessary for that.

by SoftTalker

6/13/2026 at 3:54:39 PM

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-2...

> The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

The key thing you're missing is "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct".

Congress has passed a whole bunch of laws that attach additional responsibilities to the census for the purpose of supporting government decisions.

The Permanent Census Office Act of 1902 for example, which established the census office and tacked on "an annual survey of cotton production, and other economic censuses" https://www.census.gov/about/history/historical-censuses-and...

by simonw

6/13/2026 at 3:55:42 PM

That's not true, they also wanted to get an understanding of who they were governing.

by pstuart

6/13/2026 at 3:39:42 PM

I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though.

I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.

by Telemakhos

6/13/2026 at 3:46:34 PM

They haven't stopped but they don't happen immediately.

Detailed census records are published 72 years after they were collected; the last release (of 1950 census data) came out in 2022; the next one should be published in 2032.

See: https://www.archives.gov/research/census

by Polizeiposaune

6/13/2026 at 4:25:13 PM

The Census Bureau is a lot more than the 10-year Census, and it already makes very extensive use of IRS data and other administrative sources. Virtually everything that is published using these sources uses either differential privacy or other privacy protection methods that are prohibited by the order. I'm guessing that a lot of those pieces of data are just going to be put on hold until the order is reversed or weakened. A number of things might have to go away permanently, as there's almost certainly no way to protect privacy in them without some kind of noise infusion.

TBH I don't think the people who wrote this knew how much collateral impact it would have.

by personofinteres

6/13/2026 at 8:30:36 PM

>Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.

That seems to me like it's a good thing. Allow people to determine whether the data is actually needed, rather than closing their eyes.

by Pragmata

6/13/2026 at 7:44:59 PM

This is the real reason for the fudging of the data. People don't want an ethnicity/citizenship status/birth country breakdown of things like benefit use.

by gadders

6/13/2026 at 3:23:17 PM

Thank you for writing a much more thoughtful reply to this comment than I was drafting

by mobeets

6/13/2026 at 3:37:10 PM

Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.

by bpt3

6/13/2026 at 3:43:26 PM

> Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

This works by the same principle as how nobody ever drives faster than the speed limit.

by tbrownaw

6/13/2026 at 4:13:08 PM

I don't understand your point here. Are you saying compliance isn't enforced?

As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.

by bpt3

6/13/2026 at 4:29:51 PM

They can certainly enforce that you answer the survey. But it's very difficult to enforce a requirement that people answer questions accurately, particularly when they perceive that doing so will expose them to danger.

by aesthesia

6/13/2026 at 5:36:13 PM

I don't get what danger is being referenced here that exists only if the data is released to the public (in aggregate)?

The government is the primary and arguably only source of the danger, and they already have most of the data whether you answer the ACS correctly or not.

by bpt3

6/13/2026 at 5:30:16 PM

There's not many cases of enforcement. Non-response is taken about as seriously as the Robinson–Patman act. I think the Census Bureau is very reliant on people thinking there will be enforcement, however, which is why the materials they send all have a threatening aura. I don't know about the ACS, but for the decennial census I often felt like my job as an enumerator was just to bother people until they'd answer. The case would keep being recycled until we got at least (IIRC) a head count.

by kajman

6/13/2026 at 3:27:43 PM

[flagged]

by abletonlive

6/13/2026 at 3:35:20 PM

[flagged]

by righthand

6/13/2026 at 3:36:14 PM

Yet you have no retort

by abletonlive

6/13/2026 at 3:39:05 PM

[flagged]

by righthand

6/13/2026 at 3:26:41 PM

1. People give the information to the government under the expectation that this data is to be kept private or used in such a way that individual targeting is made impossible, you break that expectation and people will lie or won't give you this data.

2. Without noise injection it's rather simple to do statistical attacks to reverse engineer individual entities.

3. This data is and has already been used in the past to undermine democratic systems by targeting and disenfranchising minorities, as well as gerrymandering the US to hell.

4. "Too dangerous to make public, too dangerous to collect" - this is a false dichotomy. To govern effectively you need sensitive data, but it should be collected and used in a way that's safe for the individuals.

5. Macro level aggregates don't need individual exposure, that's why noise, anonymization and statistical functions are fine.

by CAP_NET_ADMIN

6/13/2026 at 3:55:12 PM

Re point 1, not just an expectation, and explicit legal requirement.

by lokar

6/13/2026 at 3:22:21 PM

> They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc...

They do. After a substantial delay. Pretty handy for geneological research, while protecting privacy for the living.

by toast0

6/13/2026 at 3:19:59 PM

That's a good default position, and I think should be our starting point.

But the devil is in the details. If we don't want advertisers constructing semi-complete profiles from simple web interactions then why would we publish 330 million census questionnaires for their use?

by halJordan

6/13/2026 at 6:44:56 PM

>If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is.

While this may be a reasonable stance in theory, there are many examples in reality where the danger has not materialized for decades. Personally, I have access to health records, birth certificates, and death certificates collected by a state. They contain very personal information. As far as I know, they have not been leaked to the general public.

This is one of those situations where everything you hear tells you the system is failing, but that's because nobody talks about the systems which haven't failed.

Besides, this possible failing of the Census' privacy promises shouldn't convince us that "If only we hadn't given info to the despotic and cruel government using it to target people, then we'd only have a despotic and cruel government hurting people randomly." The solution to this problem isn't to withhold info, it's to get rid of the despots.

by vharuck

6/13/2026 at 5:25:02 PM

So do you believe that individual income should be public? Or do you believe that the government should not take income into account for taxation or distribution of benefits?

by fwipsy

6/14/2026 at 1:23:45 AM

some countries do make income available publicly.

even the USA does it for public employees in many states.

by bombcar

6/13/2026 at 3:34:18 PM

Then dox yourself right now with your previous census answers and PII. There are several obvious reasons to keep the data private, all you have to do is use your brain.

by righthand

6/13/2026 at 3:56:28 PM

I've never met a "privacy is irrelevant" advocate that doesn't close the door when they go to the toilet

by anonymars

6/13/2026 at 3:21:56 PM

Don’t quit your day job. One guess as to what gender, sexual orientation, and skin colour you have.

by UqWBcuFx6NV4r

6/13/2026 at 3:28:40 PM

But why is the census asking about those attrbutes at all. The Constitution requires a count. That's it. A number. We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.

by SoftTalker

6/13/2026 at 3:49:26 PM

> We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.

But we do. A detailed census is essential for making good policy. For example, knowing the age and distribution of children across the country helps local and state governments decide where to put the next school or children's hospital. The federal govt. allocates funds for education and daycare accordingly.

The census is the best and most important measure of govt. policy. Taking it away would leave everyone worse off.

by glitchc

6/13/2026 at 4:19:09 PM

The risks of abuse are too high and historically proven to happen eventually. There are many other ways to determine where schools and hospitals are needed, such as aggregate enrollment and admission statistics.

by SoftTalker

6/13/2026 at 4:31:06 PM

>There are many other ways to determine where schools and hospitals are needed, such as aggregate enrollment and admission statistics.

You do realize there are places where there aren't schools or hospitals?

by nojito

6/13/2026 at 4:46:12 PM

Local school districts know where they need more or fewer schools. This sort of thing isn't any business or responsibilty of the federal government at all.

by SoftTalker

6/13/2026 at 3:36:17 PM

The census is already voluntary LOL. So we’d have two censuses?

by righthand

6/13/2026 at 3:58:42 PM

Census participation is not voluntary. Failure to provide complete or accurate data is, in theory, punishable by a fine. Last census, I intentionally provided incomplete data on the web form, which resulted in a person with a clipboard and some stern questions showing up at my door.

by greyface-

6/13/2026 at 3:40:10 PM

[flagged]

by bpt3

6/13/2026 at 3:42:39 PM

[flagged]

by righthand

6/13/2026 at 3:14:15 PM

We can make them more accurate by leveraging ICE going door to door.

by whatever1

6/13/2026 at 3:18:04 PM

There will be a bunch of people that start off with the premise that this data should be private and make following arguments based on this premise.

So I'll just go ahead and ask, give me good reasons why this data should be private?

My guess is that most of you think we should be counting illegals because they should have representation. And I reject that

by abletonlive

6/13/2026 at 3:25:23 PM

It’s because people are significantly more likely to lie or omit some facts if you don’t guarantee their privacy, which means your census data ends up being worth less than a pile of shit.

The alternative is to water down the census questions, which also leads you down the same path (i.e. manure as data).

by Cyph0n

6/13/2026 at 3:33:17 PM

So you seem to have at least a surface level of understanding of incentives.

Check this then:

If the census is responsible for allocating federal funds and congressional apportionment, what are the incentives for making census data private and encouraging people that would otherwise hide their identity?

by abletonlive

6/13/2026 at 3:37:57 PM

And you seem to not realize that a census has a much wider impact than allocation of federal funds. It’s a nationwide survey done once every 10 years. No other survey compares in scale.

Now think about the data you could collect and the decisions you could make based on this data to ensure a better future for all in this country; in fact, this is a stated goal of the survey that you either didn’t know about or are willfully ignoring.

On the flip side, think about the repercussions of tainting this data and basically wasting such a valuable chance that won’t come around again for another 10 years.

by Cyph0n

6/13/2026 at 3:20:39 PM

How about we should be "counting illegals" so that we know how many of them there are?

(Do you reject that? As someone who uses the phrase "counting illegals" I imagine you would be interested in knowing what that number is.)

by simonw

6/13/2026 at 3:52:09 PM

Counting illegals on a poorly defined framework of which is largely self attestation?

by latency-guy2

6/13/2026 at 3:23:11 PM

First off the census is used for determining how many seats are used for congressional apportionment and allocating federal funds.

So unless you're willing to also say that counted illegals cannot used for either of those, then you're just being obtuse.

But if we can agree that they cannot be used for that then sure, lets identify and count them. If we can't identify (make non-private) and count them then why should we trust that those counts are accurate?

by abletonlive

6/13/2026 at 3:30:24 PM

"If we can't identify (make non-private) and count them then why should we trust that those counts are accurate?"

You're trading a chance of accuracy (good faith handling of data) for a guarantee of non-accuracy

by knollimar

6/14/2026 at 7:28:54 AM

Adding fake data (noise) officially to an important data such census, is the height of weirdness of the West. The nations are totally confused between privacy and visibility requirements. The privacy and freedom is effectively working against the very foundations of the nation, as the binding force between elements of a nation is directly affected by privacy.

Excessive obsession with equality is another thing that works to erase any cognitive abilities of the people to recognize differences in gender, race, age, culture etc. Equality is good to a reasonable extent but it shouldn't be forced to an extent to erase the cognitive capabilities gained through evolution.

by zkmon