The 2020 Census intends to ask the question: Are you a U.S. citizen? The question is simply a matter of gathering data for determining congressional seats, distributing federal money, and protecting voting rights at the Justice Department.

Only citizens may vote in federal elections. But states that have offered a welcome mat to illegal immigrants use the headcount to gain powerful advantages in numbers of congressional districts, Electoral College sway, and federal spending.

Not surprisingly, the Left is kicking and screaming at having to reveal this secret weapon of political clout. As long ago as the 2000 Census, numbers revealed that over 18 million non-citizen persons were counted above the total number of citizens.

The advantaged states with the larger noncitizen estimates are able to leverage calculated power, and it's at least worth knowing just how much. An analysis of Census 2000 data provided in 2005 by the Center for Immigration Studies revealed that about 70 percent of the noncitizens were located in just six states. Of these benefiting states, California gained six seats, where one in seven residents was a noncitizen. Three other seats went to New York, Texas, and Florida where one in 10 residents was a noncitizen.

The Electoral College is also affected by this. Congressional delegation districts determine the composition of the Electoral College.

It makes sense that the districts with the highest noncitizen counts are centered in areas where cities and counties have declared sanctuary zones. California has now announced that it is a sanctuary state. States with sanctuary districts attract a higher number of illegal aliens and are loath to admit the unlawful-alien inflation that transfers congressional seats to them from other states. The shift of congressional districts to those more liberal areas that consolidate illegal aliens arguably accounts for critical votes that put close legislative measures, such as Obamacare, over the top.

Alabama has filed a lawsuit claiming that including illegal immigrants in the 2020 Census could cause it to lose a congressional seat and an Electoral College vote. Alabama believes this “will rob the state of Alabama and its legal residents of their rightful share of representation.”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation testified before Congress to illustrate how minority populations may be disadvantaged by the lack of accurate eligible voter data. In the 2000 Census, 48 percent of Lake Park, Fla., residents were black, but “in 2009 not a single black candidate for town council had ever won a seat.” In this case, a large noncitizen Haitian population had distorted the count of the black citizenship population, rendering the Census data confusing. The problem was that the authorities “could not turn to the Census in 2009 for precise citizenship data because precise citizenship data were not collected in the 2000 Census.”

A fixed total of 435 congressional seats in the United States are divided among the states according to population — including citizens, citizen candidates such as refugees, lawful resident aliens, temporary visa holders, and illegal immigrants. The estimates for the numbers of noncitizens are derived from a questionnaire called the American Community Survey. But this long-form survey only asks the citizenship question of 2.6 percent of households.

Congress was given the constitutional power over citizenship and immigration for the very purpose that state immigration schemes would not be allowed to subvert a national “uniform rule.” Roger Sherman, likely the only Founder to have signed all four founding documents, spoke during the debates on the Naturalization Act of 1790 to say that “in order to prevent particular states receiving citizens, and forcing them upon others who would not have received them in any other manner,” the Congress should exclusively control immigration.

The Trump administration has met with resistance to reinstating the citizenship question, which was last asked on the Census in 1950. Citizen voter rights and protections go to the heart of sovereignty. President Trump is right to fulfill this federal responsibility to ensure the right of each citizen to have one undiluted vote.

Karen Lugo, is an attorney who serves as the Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Action at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and currently serves on the Federalist Society Federalism and Separation of Powers as well as the National Security and International Law Executive Committees.