CASE SUMMARY

On October 31, 2022, a Columbia University professor represented by Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Census Bureau seeking to compel a response to his Freedom of Information Act request, which sought records related to the impacts of the Bureau’s new differential privacy system on 2020 Census data. The plaintiff had requested all files describing the 2020 Census data after the Bureau had injected “noise,” but before post processing had begun, in order to assess how much distortion the post processing phase introduced and whether it created systemic data accuracy and quality errors. He sought a judicial declaration that the Bureau had violated FOIA by failing to produce the requested records by the statutory deadline and a court order requiring the records to be disclosed within a specific period of time.

  • In January 2023, the Bureau publicly announced it would be recreating and releasing the “noisy” measurement file as applied to 2010 Census data.
  • On March 27, 2023, the Bureau announced it would also release the 2020 Census “noisy” measurement file. Plaintiff dismissed his lawsuit two weeks later.

CASE LIBRARY

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York - No. 1:22-cv-9304