ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Hold onto your calculators, statisticians! After three years of fierce debates, conflicting academic papers and a lawsuit, the U.S. Census Bureau on Wednesday announced guidelines for how a statistical method will be applied to the numbers used for drawing congressional and legislative districts. The method is meant to protect the privacy of people who participated in the 2020 census, though critics have said it favors confidentiality at the expense of accurate numbers. The privacy method adds intentional errors to obscure the identity of any given participant in the 2020 census. The final parameters weigh more in favor of accuracy than privacy compared to past test versions.
