America First Legal has taken its landmark challenge against the deeply flawed 2020 Census straight to the U.S. Supreme Court, demanding that the justices reverse a lower court’s dismissal and force accountability for a count that systematically undercounted red states while padding blue ones.
On August 7, AFL, co-founded by Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller, filed a jurisdictional statement with the Supreme Court. The group is asking the high court to hear its case and overturn the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida’s ruling that dismissed the lawsuit.
A divided three-judge panel had thrown out the case in July, claiming the plaintiffs lacked standing and that the challenge came too late. Judge Steven Merryday issued a blistering dissent, warning that “If the census and the vote are not right, nothing that follows from them is right.”
This is not some technical accounting dispute. The 2020 Census, conducted under the Biden-Harris administration’s early influence after Trump left office, abandoned the Constitution’s clear command of an “actual Enumeration.”
Instead, the Census Bureau leaned heavily on statistical imputation and other gimmicks, filling in missing people with made-up data and injecting “noise” under the guise of privacy.
The result? Florida was undercounted by approximately 3.48 percent, or roughly 760,000 people. Other red and purple states took similar hits, while several blue states were overcounted.
Those distortions directly translated into lost congressional seats and Electoral College votes for Republican-leaning states. Florida, already a powerhouse of growth and Trump support, was shortchanged representation it earned.
Blue strongholds in the Northeast and elsewhere kept or gained seats they did not deserve. As AFL has repeatedly documented, the Bureau’s own data showed nearly 11 million people were “imputed,” almost double the 2010 figure, while real Americans in growing red states were missed.
“The Constitution calls for an ‘actual enumeration’ of the people so Congress can accurately allocate representatives among the states. The Census Bureau failed in 2020 to complete this count,” said Emily Percival, Senior Counsel at America First Legal. “We are asking the Supreme Court to step in to hold the Bureau to this Constitutional standard. Americans deserve to have their voices heard through accurate representation in Congress.”
AFL’s lawsuit has long targeted the Bureau’s use of Group Quarters imputation (especially for college dorms emptied by COVID) and, earlier, Differential Privacy schemes that fabricated population counts and shifted power.
These methods added fictitious people in certain areas while shortchanging others, precisely the kind of statistical sampling federal law prohibits for apportionment. The practical effect favored Democrat-heavy states and diluted the voting power of citizens in places like Florida, Texas, and beyond.
This fits a broader pattern of institutional bias against the America First agenda. The same bureaucratic apparatus that resisted citizenship questions and Trump’s efforts to exclude illegal aliens from apportionment numbers delivered a census that entrenched blue-state advantages for an entire decade.
Now AFL is forcing the issue to the highest court in the land, arguing the district court’s order effectively makes any meaningful challenge to census failures nearly impossible, despite Congress creating avenues for exactly that.
🚨 UPDATE: America First Legal has just filed with the US SUPREME COURT to fix the botched 2020 Census, which favored blue states and unfairly withheld Electoral Votes from GOP states
SCOTUS should do the right thing and ORDER it be fixed 🇺🇸
This comes as 2030 will be… pic.twitter.com/RKRdlSXMK1
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 8, 2026
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