California might be pressured to go to the November poll or the state Supreme Court docket for assist in response to the federal Census Bureau’s name for a coronavirus-prompted four-month delay in offering its 2020 inhabitants numbers to the states, a state senator says.

These new deadlines, which nonetheless have to be authorised by Congress, imply the California Citizens Redistricting Commission won’t get the demographic info it wants to attract new strains for state Meeting, Senate and congressional districts till July 31, 2021, as a substitute of Dec. 31, as now required.

However the fee’s constitutional deadline for finishing the brand new district maps is Aug. 15, 2021.

If these census numbers don’t arrive till July 2021, “it’s not doable to adjust to the legal guidelines that at present exist and nonetheless meet” the deadline two weeks later, mentioned state Sen. Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana (Orange County). “Both by litigation or by the poll, we’re going to must get that date modified, which suggests we both go to the (state) Supreme Court docket or the folks.”

It’s not only a matter of plugging the inhabitants numbers into a pc and having it shoot out the maps, mentioned Umberg, head of the state Senate Elections Committee and co-chairman of the Senate’s choose committee on the census. The fee is required to carry public hearings throughout the state on the brand new strains.

The Census Bureau’s delay “is an actual downside for California on a number of completely different ranges,” Umberg mentioned.

Legislators met Thursday to debate choices for coping with the redistricting deadlines, he added. Selections must be made rapidly, for the reason that deadline for placing an initiative on the November poll is late June.

The Census Bureau, which shut down all its discipline workplaces in March in response to coronavirus issues, has requested Congress to push its Dec. 31 deadline for whole inhabitants counts to April 30 of subsequent 12 months and its date for extra focused state redistricting numbers to July 31, 2021.

The primary group of uncooked inhabitants numbers is used to determine the variety of Congress members every state can have for the subsequent decade. The later figures, which present the place in every state these folks really reside, decide how the native strains are drawn.

The additional time is required “to make sure the completeness and accuracy of the 2020 census,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham mentioned in an April 13 assertion.

There are many causes for the present August 2021 deadline for finishing the brand new maps, mentioned Justin Levitt, an elections regulation professional at Loyola Marymount College’s Loyola Legislation College in Los Angeles.

“The date is ready so that each one authorized challenges to the strains may be handled earlier than the submitting date for the 2022 elections,” he mentioned. “And there will probably be authorized challenges in each state besides people who have just one congressman,” the place their district is all the state.

If the state can’t meet the deadline for finishing the 2022 redistricting, the courts might step in and draw the maps themselves, as they did in California in 1971 and 1991, when Republican governors vetoed maps authorised by the Democratic Legislature. The voter-approved redistricting fee took over the job in 2010.

“Courts can draw the maps, but it surely’s the final resort,” Levitt mentioned. “I anticipate the courts would agree to increase the deadlines.”

The census is desperately necessary to California, which already has put up $187 million to make sure that each resident is counted. Not solely might the state lose certainly one of its 53 congressional seats, however the census numbers are also utilized in quite a lot of methods to find out how a lot federal cash the state is due.

The coronavirus already has disrupted the count and state officers, together with group teams, are apprehensive that far too many individuals might be missed.

“The state and different teams have invested an enormous amount of cash, however we now have a complete completely different problem this 12 months,” Umberg mentioned, with the coronavirus taking an enormous toll on the state, its folks and the economic system.

“Individuals are shedding their jobs, transferring out of their houses and possibly residing with buddies,” Umberg mentioned. “We don’t have these addresses.”