Today’s Census News is a Big Deal

When with Congress and the public recognize how important the census is?

tl;dr: “American democracy depends on the census. Trump is undermining it” is my new op-ed at the Guardian. Check it out!

For census geeks, this summer has been one eeeek after another. Planks of the Jenga tower keep getting pulled out. First, the White House announced that the Census Bureau must stop using sophisticated techniques to protect the public’s confidentiality; they were told to go back to the 1960s and suppress data or round. The result will be less data, less quality data, and/or less privacy. It’s bad all around. We are starting to see the impact: critical data has been delayed.

And then a group of political operatives weaseled themselves into the bureau to produce a report that “shows” that immigrants voted in the election. Never mind that even their report shows that it had no impact on the election. Or that the quality of the data were shite. Or that they violated every norm of the Census Bureau to produce a report without names, data quality metrics, or methods. Folks were reasonably up-in-arms about what this means for the undermining of our country’s data systems.

And, then today, the Census Bureau released what they had leaked a month ago… The new “residence rules” for the 2030 census. While they are following protocol in how they are releasing them, the changes are gobsmacking. The White House is ordering the bureau to not collect data about race (or ethnicity or sexual orientation) by saying that this is the way to protect the privacy of the data and to ensure that the census is “colorblind.” It’s also ordering the bureau to not collect data about certain categories of non-citizens, despite the Constitutional requirement to count everyone. And there are lots of other weirdo changes in there. Like counting people based on where they live during the winter rather than where they live for the majority of the year (presumably to give states with “snow bird” populations extra people).

What bugs me the most about all of this is that the Constitution gave Congress the responsibility to govern the census. Will they? Or have they absconded with their responsibilities entirely?

And what will it take for Congress and the public to realize that every important decision about the 2030 census is about to take place NOW. Whenever I talk to people about the census, their eyes glaze over. And when I push, they tell me that it can all be fixed in 2029. It can’t be. This piece of data infrastructure is the core of American democracy – and the critical questions are happening now.

Oh, how I wish that more people would care to learn about what’s happening with the census. (Of course I do – I wrote a whole book about it.) It’s just sooooo important. But it’s also so infrastructural. And infrastructures are boring. But they shouldn’t be!

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