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Comment by vearwhershuh | Hacker News Reader

Nothing. Nothing happens. You may get an in-person visit, and if you blow them off, nothing also happens.

As with voting, it only encourages them. They are passionate about getting you to participate because they want the appearance of legitimacy, so you get obvious fear-and-guilt-prop like this.

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> Nothing. Nothing happens.

Except for your area getting federally undercounted, which loses representation and tax dollars for you and all your neighbors.

Is there any reason to believe that more people are failing to fill out the census in my area than in other areas? Because if the failure rate is about the same everywhere it probably does make little difference.

How do you know the failure rate is the same everywhere? It is very possible that the failure rate correlates with the region because it is not a purely stochastic process. Some users here think the government has no business in demanding census information and simply ignore it.

I don't have any data either way, do you? HN users don't represent a geographical region, per se, but I suppose you could argue that they're mostly in SF? Regardless, I imagine there are other communities that might also have a higher-than-baseline failure rate, but absent any evidence I have no reason to assume they're not fairly randomly distributed geographically. Especially at the granularity of US states.

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