In a huge win at the end of June, the Supreme Court blocked Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ attempt to add a controversial and untested citizenship question to the 2020 census that many feared would have led to a massive undercount. The 5-4 decision blocked the Department’s decision on the ground that it violated federal law by providing only a pretextual reason for adding the question. In the wake of the court’s ruling, the Trump administration initially insisted that it would continue to push forward with the citizenship question. But on July 11, the administration officially abandoned its push, confirming that the question will not appear on the census.

Even without the citizenship question on the form, however, serious threats still face the next census. By attempting to add the question, the federal government has eroded the public’s trust in the confidentiality of their responses, with immigrants and people of color reporting a particularly severe decline in trust. In addition, the census now faces logistical challenges of hiring adequate staff and printing census forms on time, as well as conducting the survey largely online for the first time ever.

Read more about the main takeaways from the Supreme Court’s opinion here, and learn more about crucial historical errors in that opinion here.

The same day as its citizenship question decision, the Supreme Court refused to weigh in on partisan gerrymandering, holding that such claims were “political questions” beyond the reach of federal courts and dismissing lawsuits challenging maps in North Carolina and Maryland. For the foreseeable future at least, the 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts ends a multi-decade fight to establish a constitutional rule against partisan gerrymandering, including suits over gerrymandered maps in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan.

A robust broader fight for fair maps continues on other fronts, however. At the center of this fight are important reforms that would have been necessary even if the Supreme Court had created a rule against partisan gerrymandering. Building on the successful passage of reforms in a record five states in 2018, citizen- and lawmaker-led efforts to reform redistricting are underway at the state and federal level. And voters may also see success in state court, like Pennsylvanians did in 2018.

Read more about the Court’s opinion in Rucho here and more about the ongoing efforts for redistricting reform here.

This November, Virginia voters will go to the polls using a new house of delegates map that redraws 11 districts found by a federal court to be unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. District 76 illustrates the positive effect of the new map for African-American voters. Under Virginia’s racially gerrymandered state house map, Suffolk City was divided into two districts, with many heavily African-American parts of the city drawn into an elongated district stretching almost to Portsmouth and Norfolk. Under the remedial map, all of Suffolk City is now included in the same district (District 76). Previously, District 76 was 25 percent African American. By reuniting the heavily African-American parts of Suffolk City with the rest of the city, the new district is now 43 percent African American. Politically, that change means the district goes from a district where Donald Trump won 52 percent of the vote to one where Hillary Clinton would have won 56 percent.

• New Hampshire is poised to join the five states that transformed their redistricting processes in 2018, with bipartisan reform legislation awaiting Governor Sununu’s signature. The new law creates an independent advisory commission and establishes strong criteria for drawing congressional, state, executive council, and county commission lines. Read more about the reform’s benefits here.
• The Brennan Center’s guide to redistricting criteria explains how strong rules help map drawers reflect public input, protect the political power of minority communities, and avoid political manipulation.
• A new report and interactive tool from the Urban Institute projects how undercounts in the 2020 census will affect communities across the country.
• The Census Bureau released a working paper outlining the potential effects of adding a citizenship question to the decennial census. Drawing on response patterns in the American Community Survey and the 2010 census, the paper predicts a drop in self-response of nearly 9 million people, a number significant enough to substantially increase costs and dramatically reduce the quality of the overall count.
• In an article published by the Columbia Law Review, Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund chronicles the consequences of a census undercount for people of color and suggests potential methods for limiting undercounts in 2020.