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The Politics of Counting The Trump administration attempted to subvert the census for political ends. How successful were they? BY M A R C I A BR O W N ON DECEMBER 31, 2020, the Census Bureau missed a crucial deadline that caused a huge sigh of relief in Democratic circles. Statutory law dictates the Bureau must report the data that will determine reapportionment of House seats to the president by the end of the year. But a global pandemic and administrative interference combined to make this impossible. It was the first missed census deadline since the December 31 date was established in 1976. As of January 12, bureau officials were telling courts that they were now working toward completing the count by March 6, 2021. The delayed timeline puts the data out of the reach of Donald Trump. In 2019, his administration pushed to add a citizenship question to the census, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court because of procedural violations, like failing to notify Congress about the changes. But Trump never gave up trying to exclude immigrant populations from the count that would be used for reapportionment and redistricting, in an effort to rob people of color of representation and to boost states with smaller immigrant populations. Whether through the Bureau slow-walking the release or merely attempting to ensure an accurate count, the delay means that this attack on undocumented people has, for the moment, failed. “It’s better that it turns out this way. The route that we’re going now is the more cautious,” said Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor at Princeton who runs the Princeton Election Consortium. Nevertheless, these efforts instilled fear in immigrant communities, and may have deterred them from responding to the census. Indeed, the shortened timeline imposed by Trump required that the Bureau take shortcuts that cannot be undone by the incoming Biden administration. And between this
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and other Trump administration machinations, an undercount is still very possible—even likely. Especially with the right wing entrenched on the Supreme Court for a generation, we could see significant game-playing with the census data, even in the near future. The near-miss from the departure of Trump, in other words, may still boomerang back to damage democracy. THE DECENNIAL CENSUS— which is all about counting where people are on April 1 of the enumeration year—was clearly going to be complicated, given the pandemic. Not only was the door-to-door follow-up hampered by fears of contracting COVID, but people had moved unpredictably: Impoverished people struggled to stay housed, college students left dormitories, young Americans moved back in with their parents, and elderly people moved out of nursing homes. The Bureau could no longer count on people being where they usually were, and hard-to-count populations became harder to count, making respondents likely to be whiter and more affluent. “Folks who were already the easyto-count folks, households in the middle and upper-middle class in wealthy suburbs,” said Robert Santos, vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute. “The folks who were most affected, lost jobs and they had to carry out online school, they also happened to be the folks who were the hardest to count.” Census officials supplement the count with high-quality administrative data like IRS tax forms, Social Security, and government health plan records, to estimate the number of people at a nonresponsive address. But many people who live in the United States, particularly undocumented immigrants, would have none of these forms. “The hard-tocount communities are also the ones
that tend to have the worst administrative data available,” Santos said. Civic organizations worked hard to try to spread the word in these communities, explained Beth Lynk, Census Counts Campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She pointed to tele-town halls, partnerships with food banks and postmasters general to deliver gift bags with census information, and Stop the Knock campaigns that encouraged selfparticipation online for those afraid of contracting COVID or fearful of the government coming to their door. “The infrastructure and the scope and scale of it was unprecedented,” Lynk said. The campaigns saw a marked increase in participation, and the model could be used to support disaster relief and vaccine distribution. “This is infrastructure that can be used for civic engagement,” Lynk explained. During the “field period,” the Census Bureau attempts to count nonresponsive households. Because of the pandemic, Santos said there was a “general understanding” from Congress and the White House that the Bureau would have an extra 120 days for the field period. Instead, the White House demanded the Bureau meet the statutory deadline of December 31 for apportionment, condensing the time in the field. Not only did the administration shorten the period for door-knocking, but it also pushed the Bureau to rush the data processing, where the Bureau sorts out any anomalies, such as double-counting. “They had to cut corners and they had to find new ways to make the delivery,” Santos said. In sworn testimony, Howard Hogan, a former demographer at the Bureau, emphasized the problems with a shortened timeline. “[T]he compressed schedule for post data collection processing carries a grave risk of a greatly increased differential undercount,” he wrote. Furthermore, even after losing the citizenship question effort, the Trump administration continued to devise ways to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count. An executive order in July 2020 directed the Bureau to exclude undocumented
