CLEVELAND, Ohio - Why is it taking so long to get census 2020 done?
Increasingly this question is being raised, none more directly than in a lawsuit filed by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.
The Ohio suit demands that the Census Bureau meet the federal deadline to provide redistricting information to the states by March 31 so work can begin on drawing new congressional districts and other political boundaries in advance of the 2022 elections.
The bureau responded in direct terms, saying that it’s not possible, in large part because of the pandemic. The bureau is sticking to its earlier promise to provide the details by Sept. 30, though it has offered up an option to turn over data by August for states that would like to complete the final cleanup work themselves.
That position seems reasonable to some people deeply familiar with the process, including John Thompson, who as director of the census from 2013 to 2017 helped lay the groundwork for census 2020 and previously worked for the bureau from 1975 to 2002.
“It’s like someone just poured the foundation of the house, and they sued them to get the house in a week. They’re asking the Census Bureau to do something they cannot do,” Thompson said during a telephone interview this week.
But it’s already been a year since the Census Bureau mailed out questionnaires. The self-response forms were cut off in October. The last big wave of in-person visits with individuals was done in September.
What’s the holdup? Like so much else over the last several months, the pandemic gets a lot of the blame, but not all of it.
Accurately tabulating the nation’s population block by block is not as simple as collecting numbers in a spreadsheet and spitting out results.
Beyond problems brought on by suspending field work for months last year, Thompson said any census involves “solving the anomalies - taking out duplicates. doing editing, correcting responses that are contradictory, like you can’t have a 5-year-old as the head of the household, or you can’t have everyone in a household who is 5 years old.”
Some things to consider, some of which the Census Bureau has outlined in blog posts over the last couple of months:
* Forms must be checked to make sure people aren’t being counted twice or in the wrong place. Did a student fill out a form at a college apartment (where he or she should be counted if they were living there) and the parents also include the same student on their own census form?
* When no response is received from an address, other government records often are checked to fill in the blanks. Is someone actively on Medicare at the address, for example? This can be time-consuming to improve accuracy.
* In an attempt to increase responses, the Census Bureau in 2020 offered internet and telephone options. These submissions didn’t require pre-assigned census IDs. But submissions without a census ID have to be reconciled with addresses and other information as a check against over- or under-counting. There always was some need for these checks even with paper forms, but they went way up with the online option.
* Ahead of the pandemic, the timetable called for accepting self-response forms by mail, phone or the internet through July 31. That was moved back to Oct. 15. Follow-ups with non-responding households were also delayed months. And data collection from hard-to-reach portions of Alaska was pushed back four months to a new end date of Aug. 31.
* The counting of homeless people by visiting shelters, soup kitchens and encampments was delayed nearly six months from March 30/April 1 to Sept. 22-25.
* Some of the most involved work - counting people in group quarters such as dorms, prisons, nursing homes, military barracks and other places - was suspended last spring because of the pandemic. By the time coronavirus restrictions were lifted, some of these people had moved. Work on cross checks for these populations involved follow-ups with thousands of group quarter locations from Dec. 10-21.
D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer and editor at the Pew Research Center, has followed the developments closely as manager of Pew’s @allthingscensus Twitter account. She offered praise for the transparency the Census Bureau has shown in working through the issues of the last year.
“No census is completely accurate. This time, the Census Bureau is releasing more information on its quality metrics than in the past, so we will have a better idea than we do now how good its numbers are,” Cohn said. “The bureau also is giving special access to some statisticians from outside the agency who are working on their own report about data quality. We should know more within a few months.”
Short of another schedule change, the Census Bureau by April 30 will deliver to President Joe Biden the state population counts that determine how the 435 seats in the U.S. House will be divided among states for the 2022 to 2030 elections. (Ohio may drop from 16 seats to 15). This is four months after the Dec. 31 federal deadline for this initial information.
The local data needed to actually draw the district maps is not being promised until Sept. 30. This includes population with race and Hispanic details down to the neighborhood level, an area referred to as census blocks.
Rich Exner, data analysis editor for cleveland.com, writes about numbers on a variety of topics. Follow on Twitter @RichExner. Find data-related stories at cleveland.com/datacentral. Find previous census 2020 at this link.
Previous coverage
As census 2020 work resumes, concerns loom of undercount in places like Cleveland
Census 2020 suspends field operations; households urged to complete forms by internet, phone or mail