Our podcast guest Hansi Lo Wang underscored that there has never been a perfect Census--there have always been historically undercounted groups. This emerged from our Constitution itself, which stated that an enslaved person should be counted as ⅗ of a free person (!) and specified the exclusion of Native Americans who were not taxed. Thankfully, this changed through the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War and by 1940, the Census Bureau also determined that all American Indians should be counted so that was the first year that ALL Americans were used for apportionment to determine House seats and Electoral College votes.
