Census Games

On August 3, the Census Bureau announced it was cutting short data collection for the 2020 census by one month.  Collection had been scheduled to end on October 31.  Now the deadline for critical door-knocking efforts and collecting responses online, over the phone and by mail has been changed to September 30.

The technicalities of census data collection may seem at first arcane, but this shortening of the period has profound economic, political and practical implications.  At this time, the Census Bureau has been unable to reach over 40% of American households, which they call the "hard-to-reach," predominantly the poor, minorities, immigrant groups and renters that tend to vote Democratic, although they also include rural voters who tend to vote Republican.  Even the October 31 date had been criticized by census officials as too soon because of the interruption of data collection efforts by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Well before the deadline was moved to Sep 30, Albert Fontenot, associate director for decennial census programs, said, "We are past the window of being able to get those counts by [Oct 31] at this point.”

The follow-up to count the hard-to-reach began August 11.  Census workers sometimes have to make as many as sixteen attempts to reach someone at their suspected residence, a time-consuming job made even harder by limitations caused by the pandemic.

"There is no reason not to extend the deadline unless you are trying to embed an undercount of certain groups of people in the census counts," said Nancy Potok, a former deputy director at the Census Bureau who recently retired as the United States' chief statistician.

It should come as a shock to no one that the Administration is pushing for an undercount to reduce the economic and political power of minorities and the poor:

• The Administration had previously attempted to add a citizenship question to the census, which, it was generally agreed, would have decreased the number of immigrants responding to the questionnaire.  The citizenship question was later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. 
  
• In July, the number of political appointees to the Bureau was expanded from one person to three without a given reason.  The addition was initiated by the White House and was not vetted or even discussed with any Bureau official nor did the appointees have any special qualification for their positions.  (One had, in fact, previously questioned why the data collection should be expanded for hard-to-reach people.)
• In defiance of previous explicit legal definitions, the Administration directed the Census Bureau late last month to exclude non-documented immigrants from the census count.  This directive will almost certainly be overturned by the courts.  In the meantime, the damage that will be done to an accurate count is unknown.
  

Decennial census data is used to apportion Representatives to Congress, so an undercount of hard-to-reach residents will result in state re-apportionments that skew Republican.  Census data dictates the allocation of federal dollars and influences everything from infrastructure investments, education programs (like free and reduced lunch) and public health-care spending.  Again this would have major impact upon the states.  It is also used for statistical measures that will affect the funding of multiple local, state, and federal programs.  The 2020 census count will remain the basis for all such decisions until 2030, making its impact long-lasting and potentially devastating: In Texas, for instance, data experts have estimated that even a one percent undercount of Latinos would lead to a loss of $300 million in federal funding per year for the next decade.

These important decisions will no longer be based on fact but on a politically-determined fiction.

Democrats have naturally challenged the Administration's re-imagining of reality, but it is unclear whether their challenges will have any impact on how the census is conducted.

The Democratically controlled House of Representatives has included in its new COVID-19 relief bill an extension of time for data collection, but the Republican Senate has, not surprisingly, refused to include it in its proposals.

While the President's blatant political attacks on the previously non-political Census Bureau are not a surprise, they remain profoundly destructive to our democracy.  The President and the Republican Party continue to destroy American democratic norms, excluding poor people and minorities from political representation and federal funds, using the power of the presidency to further pervert our democracy.

In writing the American Constitution, the Founders — having the autocratic King George in mind — carefully limited the authority of presidents by giving them few powers.  They did not, however, foresee the explosive growth of government that would give the president control over law enforcement, the military, economic policy, education, the environment, and most other aspects of national life.  That administration behemoth is responsible only to the president who is only loosely accountable to the electorate.  

The Founders also institutionalized the legislature and judiciary as branches co-equal to the presidency.  They did not, however, foresee the partisan degeneration of Congress that would render it incapable of controlling presidential malfeasance.  

The debacle of the census is only one further manifestation of a democracy in desperate need of reform.