By Howard Fischer | Capitol Media Services
Gov. Doug Ducey said Thursday he won’t appeal the official census numbers for Arizona despite the financial hit they will mean to the state.
The decision comes despite the fact that the official tally showed the widest negative disparity of any state between the estimates put out by the Census Bureau and what the agency said was actually counted. In fact, those official numbers even fell nearly 270,000 below what the agency had predicted would be the final number.
What all that means goes beyond the fact that Arizona won’t add a tenth congressional seat in the 2022 election as had been projected.
The governor’s own census team had said that each 1% difference in the official count from the actual population translated to $62 million in lost federal aid. And with a 3.8% difference, that comes out to more than $235 million a year — or $2.35 billion over the course of a decade until the next official count.
