And remember, the census goes everywhere, and counts people where it finds them, without regard to whether they can vote. In a practice called “prison gerrymandering” by its critics, the census counts incarcerated persons as residents of the county where the prison lies, not of the place where they lived before going inside. Especially since census data are now used for allocating not only federal representatives but also state and local ones, this manner of counting gives localities an incentive to build a prison and fill it. Long after the Three-Fifths Clause was repealed, we are still counting black people who can’t vote and using their numbers to increase the political power of the free people nearby.
