The Logistics of the US Census [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Logistics of the US Census [video]

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Of note is that the Census starts today and when you respond you are supposed to respond about where you will be living on April 1.

If you have a child that is away at college and that school has not sent people home, you will fill out the survey without that child, as he or she is supposed to be counted in the city in which their college is located.

If, after you fill in the survey, the college goes online-only and sends students home and does so before April 1, what do you do?

I imagine you fill it out as accurately as you can with the information you have at the time.

The results of the census are used for things like federal funding and how many representatives each state gets in Congress.

Not counting hundreds of thousands of college students is a pretty big deal!

You can always wait until April 1 to submit your responses. There's no requirement that you answer ASAP, just that you answer before the deadline.

I wonder how coronavirus will impact the census? Given the circumstances, sending a bunch of people to knock on a bunch of doors doesn't seem like a great idea...

I expect that it will, quite severely.

Plus there's already tales of paranoid anti-government people shooting at, assaulting, or killing census workers. That's going to get worse this year, I feel.

EDIT: I am not saying that all anti-government people are paranoid. Nor that all anti-government people are murderous, or mentally ill.

Well, seeing as this is the first US Census in history where we expect the vast majority of the responses to come via a website rather than manual counting, it's an excellent coincidence.

Of course NRFU (Non-Response Follow Up) is still a manual process.

We can all help by filling out the census online when we get our letters in the mail. Note: they start arriving today (March 12, 2020)!

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