Census massively undercounts Blacks and Hispanics; seriously overcounts non-Hispanic whites

I don’t know anything about this area but I’m pretty sure this is a botched NYT story:

I looked at the Census report that the story is based on, and as far as I can tell it concludes that at the nationwide level the population undercount was 782,000, i.e., about a quarter of one percent, which would not be statistically significant.

The big story here it seems is the massive undercounting of Hispanics — the Hispanic population was undercounted by 4.99%, which would be around three million people. In percentage terms that’s more than triple the comparable undercount from the 2010 census.

Similarly, Black Americans were undercounted by 3.3%, which was more than 50% higher of an undercount than in 2010.

American Indians not living on reservations were undercounted by .86%, while those living on reservations were undercounted by a startling 5.64%.

White non-Hispanics were over-counted by 1.64%, double the over-count rate in 2010.

According to the report, all this is somehow not meaningful in terms of things like the parceling out of congressional districts, which seems, um, counter-intuitive, but again I don’t know anything about the technicalities involved.

That said, these sure seem like some very striking coincidences, given the current voter suppression efforts being pursued by the Republican party.

Which in turn reminds me of something a Mexican prosecutor once told me about the gentlemen running the Gulf cartel: “These guys don’t believe in coincidences.”