Alaska Officially Has 733,391 People - According To The 2020 Census - UPDATED

Just got his email from Peter Torkelson, executive director of the Alaska Redistricting Board.  (You can subscribe to these email updates from the redistricting board here. 

"Good afternoon subscribers -- A few minutes ago the US Census announced the total population numbers for each state.  Alaska's official 2020 resident population is 733,391. This means the population target for new legislative districts will be 733,391/40 = 18,335."

Let's take that apart a bit.  Nothing more than 3rd grade arithmetic at most, I promise.  Alaska has forty state house seats.  The state senate is made up of pairings of those forty seats - that is two adjacent house seats make up one senate seat. 

Each house seat should have the same number of people in it as every other house seat.  Of course, that would be quite a feat.  So the goal is to make them within 1-2% of each other.  In cases where this just isn't possible, the absolute maximum difference is 10%.  (This is based on my memory from last year.  Once the Board gets these number broken down by census districts, the Board will get a lot busier and we'll get these details refreshed.)

So, if there are 40 districts that have to have equal population, you have to divide the total population by 40.  Which is what Peter has done to get 18,335 residents per district.  Actually, my calculator says it's 18,334.775.  Which does mean that it is truly impossible to get all the districts exactly equal.  And since the time they recorded everybody, people have moved out of the state or into the state and new people have been born and some people have died.  So the number is always in flux.

The magic number for each district based on the 2010 data was 17,755.  So each district this time will have 580 more people.  Theoretically.  

I'd add that this includes all Alaska residents, not just those of voting age, not even just US citizens, but all the people who live here.  

To put that in context, [see below] people have applied for Alaska Permanent Fund this year.  [I thought I was going to get that number from the PFD office in Juneau.  Chris transferred me to Corey, but he didn't answer the phone. (It is after 4pm now, though it wasn't when I started these calls.)  I'll add the number in when I get it]

[UPDATED 5pm:  Corey got back to me.  They are still entering paper applications into the system by hand.  As of this afternoon at 4:30pm, they have 643,117 applications and he expects 25-30,000 more.]

Meanwhile  here are the PFD's numbers for population and applications since 2020.

 Remember the magic number:  18,335