With Census Count Finishing Early, Fears of a Skewed Tally Rise

[Celerity]

With 60 million households still uncounted, the bureau said it would wrap up the survey a month early. Critics called it a bald move to politicize the count in favor of Republicans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/us/2020-census-ending-early.html



WASHINGTON — With the Trump administration’s decision to end the 2020 census count four weeks early, the Census Bureau now has to accomplish what officials have said it cannot do: accurately count the nation’s hardest-to-reach residents — nearly four of every 10 households — in just six weeks. The result is both a logistical challenge of enormous proportions that must take place in the middle of a pandemic, and yet another political crisis for the census, historically a nonpartisan enterprise. The announcement, which came Monday evening, immediately generated sharp criticism.

On Tuesday, four former directors of the Census Bureau issued a statement warning that an earlier deadline would “result in seriously incomplete enumerations in many areas across our country,” and urged the administration to restore the lost weeks. The directors, who served under Democratic and Republican presidents, also urged Congress to assemble a trusted body of experts to develop standards for assessing the quality of the bureau’s population totals. A similar plea was issued on Tuesday by an official network of agencies and nonprofit institutions that act as liaisons between the Census Bureau and state governments, helping them use population data to make policies.

“The credibility of the U.S. Census Bureau as the gold standard of data in the United States will be undermined by rushing an incomplete census count to meet deadlines,” a letter from the group stated. The Census Bureau, which had earlier set and planned on an April 2021 deadline because of the coronavirus pandemic, said the change was needed to meet a federal deadline to get the numbers to President Trump by the end of the year. But Democratic lawmakers said the change reflected a deliberate attempt to undercount groups that tend to support their party. Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the House majority leader, said on Tuesday that the change was an attempt to undercount poor communities with large numbers of immigrants and ethnic minorities and called the shortened schedule “yet another example of this administration’s blatant assault on our Constitution and our democracy.”

Federal law requires the Census Bureau to send population totals to the president by Dec. 31 of every census year. But the pandemic forced census officials in April to rewrite that timeline, pushing delivery of population totals to April 2021. The House approved the new deadline in May, but the Republican-controlled Senate has not followed suit, apparently at Mr. Trump’s behest. The Constitution requires a count of all residents, but Mr. Trump has long made clear his desire to have population counts of citizens, not all residents. The president ordered the Census Bureau last month to produce a state-by-state count of undocumented immigrants so he could remove undocumented residents from census totals before he sends them to Congress for use in reapportioning the House. Several lawsuits have argued that would be unconstitutional.

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[beachbumbob]

1. anything stopping Biden administration from redoing the census?

[yardwork]

2. Not possible. The Census is done once every 10 years.

Don't elect Republicans in census years. It's s bad idea for numerous reasons.

[beachbumbob]

3. census is required to be done every 10 years, what stops it from being done sooner?

btw, where do illegal immigrants live for the most part? Vastly undercounting them in redsates will be a negative for GOP if they are thinking about getting additional congressional districts