I have a piece in today’s USA Today distilling my Corner posts on answering “American” to the census race question. The editor, while writing the paper’s own editorial on the subject (mine was the “opposing view”), called the Census Bureau yesterday and asked what they’d do with “American” responses. She was told, as I’d expected, that they’d just impute the race — i.e., make up their own answer based on various factors, like where you live.

This prompted a thought, maybe for Hans von Spakovsky or Roger Clegg: The Supreme Court has said the Bureau can’t impute the existence of people who didn’t send in forms when giving the head count for purposes of reapportionment of House (and state legislature) seats; the Democrats had wanted to do that, figuring it would give them several extra congressmen. Based on that precedent, is there a constitutional challenge to be made to imputing respondents’ race? That information is, after all, also used in reapportionment to make sure as many black Democratic voters as possible are packed into a single district to ensure the election of more Republicans (not how supporters would describe it, but that’s what it does). If you can’t make up people, can you make up people’s races?