In addition to congressional apportionment, the population miscalculations will also simultaneously affect the Electoral College map for the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections. Taking into account Spakovsky’s calculations, an increasingly conservative Florida, for instance, should potentially have 32 electoral votes for the next decade, while Democrat-leaning states such as Minnesota and Rhode Island should have only nine and three votes, respectively.

Despite the major impact the counting errors will have on Americans’ congressional representation and future elections, the U.S. Census Bureau says it cannot explain how such blunders occurred in the first place.

“While the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey can estimate undercounts and overcounts in the census, PES data cannot answer why a particular state may have experienced one,” the agency said in its report.