For more than a year, the Trump administration has attempted to carry out a brazen, undemocratic power grab. But it has nothing to do with the election.

Beneath the din of Trump’s lies about voter fraud and refusal to concede, his administration has engaged in a subtler — and likely far more consequential — effort to manipulate the electoral playing field to the Republican Party’s advantage. At its core is the pivotal (if mundane) once-a-decade task of using census data to reapportion seats in the US House of Representatives.

In a memorandum published on July 21, 2020 — a year after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s effort to depress census participation by including a citizenship question on the questionnaire — the president claimed he had the authority to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census population counts used to allocate House seats.