The 2020 census is being ‘sabotaged,’ says leading U.S. statistician
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Random question but why would some races have more trouble than others responding to the census? Is it more to do with poverty than race? Or is there a cultural distrust of the census that aligns with race?
So yes it's is undercounting poor people, but also disproportionately immigrants and relatives of immigrants.
I've known a number of local households that had undocumented Canadians, Brits and Germans.
It's been my experience that Americans who are hyper-concerned with illegal immigration, aren't grinding their teeth over these nationalities.
So I still stand by my point that poor white people aren't likely to have undocumented people living in their household at all. Regardless of race.
>I've known a number of local households that had undocumented Canadians, Brits and Germans.
Also how many of those households were poor? There isn't nearly as much incentive for a poor Canadian, Brit, or German to come here as an undocumented immigrant because they'd be giving up guaranteed health care and far more permissive social services.
Race is already being used as a proxy for political affiliation. Using a proxy for Race as a proxy for political affiliation is less efficient, but still effective.
> The notion of these counts ever being used for enforcement — basically targeting high population, low citizenship-count blocks for ICE raids or whatever — that would be really, really problematic.
Stepping back, think in general about a government that wants to target, arrest, and deport certain groups of people, that is also going door to door and trying to establish records of who everyone is and where they live. Because of the bad optics of this, the US census has traditionally been extremely independent from law enforcement. The government has recently been attacking this barrier e.g. with the citizenship question and other things discussed in the article. Historically speaking, you might argue marginalized groups in such scenarios would be foolish to trust the census.
Yes. They are deporting people who didn't come into the country legally. Its important to have an accurate count of citizens in the country since that's who votes. There is an upcoming Supreme Court case that will determine if non citizens should be counted for House representation.
You may not agree with it, but it is important to know. With that said, I don't think ending the census early is the right way to handle this issue at all, it's just slimy.
So "all other Persons", i.e. slaves, were counted.
And yeah, they have rights. But they don't have the right to freedom as we know it nor do they have the right not to be slaves.
In general, folks would agree that if you are in a situation where you are forced to eat at certain times, possibly only use toilets or showers at certain times, can be used as labor with little to no pay, and can never roam freely at the behest of armed guards that can shoot you, you aren't free. The main exception to some of this is military, but for now, this is something folks choose and some countries' soldiers are more free than the ones in the states.
So, they could ask to be counted, but there is no mandate to count them.
Moreover, collecting demographics data is orthogonal and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03...
Two points on history and tradition. The census was originally carried out by the US Marshals. That should indicate the importance and weight of the project. The citizenship question was part of the census until 2000 (1950 short form, 2000 long form).
If you are using the census to distribute voting power to states, and the distribution is based on count of citizens, not people, then it is a fair question to ask.
Slaves couldn't vote either, but in the famous compromise were counted as a portion of a person - the distribution of political power is why.
Women only got the franchise 100 years ago, but had always been counted on the census.
> If you’re hard to count, you’re hard to count. The people who are hardest to count, the ones we worry most about in terms of undercount, are the same folks whose families don’t have food at night or don’t have a job. They’re worried about getting tossed out because they can’t make the rent. Or they’re ill and don’t have health insurance. Those folks tend not to have participating in the census at the top of their minds because they have basic needs that have to be met — for themselves, their children and sometimes for their parents and grandparents.
American black are incarcerated more often which affects whole community. Ex prisoners and their families have unique housing stability problems.
Their family structure is different - more single women with or without children as males are not available. Also, more tight communities. Less of nuclear family more of extended family.
White people live more segregated per socioeconomic class, black mix more. Blacks and white are segregated anyway, so whatever you do you are not reaching both.
Black people have a higher than average non-response rate, even controlling for income, possibly due to a cultural mistrust of government institutions (for good reason).
Recent immigrants may not be able to read the language the census was mailed to them in, and may also be hesitant to respond due to fears of deportation- the point of the census isn’t to hunt down illegals, and people here legally shouldn’t be deported anyway, but the current administration hasn’t done much to reassure people. These effects will apply in differing amounts to Latino and Asian communities.
Finally, the bulk of the census is conducted by mail, and it takes a while to complete. Families without a permanent home might not be counted because they are only temporarily living with another family when the census arrives at that house, or they might be moving between addresses so that they aren’t counted in the response by any household at those addresses. This also disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
And at least for me, I only received instructions in the mail telling me to do the census online. Not all families have easy access to the internet, and some just can’t be bothered to take the time to respond. This again disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
To try to counteract these problems, the Census hires people to walk on foot and get responses from low coverage areas. But if you cut down on that effort, you’re going to miss some. One of the results of this could be that the census shows fewer poor people in some cities which will affect government funding decisions. But the tough part for a statistician is showing how much time is needed to walk around and get the coverage that you desire (and how many people you hire to do it). You can make some relatively small changes to your assumptions and get different answers. But cutting the time by a third is a pretty dramatic cut, so without looking at the details, I’m guessing that the coverage has decreased. That’s generally a bad thing since a census is supposed to be a full count of the population and not a sample.
Edit: I’ll also tack on a more nefarious interpretation than just using the Census to cut federal aid money to some cities. The Census is also used to portion electoral college votes for presidential elections. Because of the communities that are affected by this undercoverage, states that normally vote Democrat are more likely to lose votes than states that normally vote Republican. So this could make it easier for a Republican president to be elected in the next couple elections (the votes for the current election will not change however).
FWIW, I believe the Census Bureau sent either an online form or a paper form, depending on the prevalence of internet access in your area. I think they would also follow up with a form in the mail if you didn't respond online.
Apartment living is also a big factor for postal balloting. Security of mail boxes, inconsistent updates for forwarding addresses, etc.
> states that normally vote Democrat are more likely to lose votes than states that normally vote Republican
because it could be true (1) that individuals who vote Democrat are more likely to go uncounted but (2) that states that vote Democrat are not more likely to be undercounted.
A few (totally imaginary) mechanisms that would do this: 1. Suppose Democrats who are surrounded by Republicans tend not to respond to the census, but everyone else does. Then you'll undercount Democrats, but mostly in places full of Republicans. 2. Suppose rural Democrats tend not to respond to the census, but everyone else does. Then again you'll undercount Democrats, but mostly in more-rural states, which tend to lean Republican. 3. Suppose poorer people (however they vote) tend not to respond to the census, but everyone else does. All else equal, richer people are more likely to vote Republican, but richer states are more Democratic. (I think Andrew Gelman's "Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State" talks about this.) Then Democrats will be undercounted more, but Republican states may be undercounted more.
I don't know whether mechanisms with this sort of counterintuitive property are actually responsible for enough of the census-counting difficulties to produce that paradoxical outcome, but it doesn't seem obviously impossible.
(Of course, if what we're considering is the nefariousness of possible motivations, then what matters isn't whether such mechanisms actually do do that, but whether the potentially-nefarious people in question expect them to. That's a different question and my guess is that they probably don't even if they should.)
> It’s not going to be much. If you’re hard to count, you’re hard to count. The people who are hardest to count, the ones we worry most about in terms of undercount, are the same folks whose families don’t have food at night or don’t have a job. They’re worried about getting tossed out because they can’t make the rent. Or they’re ill and don’t have health insurance. Those folks tend not to have participating in the census at the top of their minds because they have basic needs that have to be met — for themselves, their children and sometimes for their parents and grandparents.
> Because of those things that those people have to deal with, you actually could have extended the time for another month on top of that and you’d only get marginal gains. The census was already in a tough position. It would definitely help to get as much time as possible, because as people become acquainted with how to deal with Covid, they can do the grassroots effort that’s needed to get people to participate. But it’s going to be a marginal increase. At the end of the day, the die has been cast for quite a while: There are going to be undercounts of communities of color. The only question is how large — and is it so large that action needs to be taken in the form of litigation or legislation.
Because that changes how I think of this. If you've undercounted LA county population by 1,000 that's a completely different beast than 100,000.
It'd be nice to think that could never happen again. But then you had the Trump people literally trying to put a citizenship question on the census despite every expert saying it was a mistake. The intent was clearly to intimidate (we have this in writing). The question ended up being left off but the damage was already somewhat done.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/17/us/report-says-census-bur... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03...
The various software the local offices use actively hinders the job of management and enumerators (the people who come to your door). Hundreds of and hundred of millions of dollars and incalculable time is wasted just due to this. Imagine the worst ERP or CRM that you have ever used, this is worse and approximately 250 offices use it across the country, and this inhibits the jobs of nearly half a million people.
Talk to any Area manager, Lead Census Field Manager/Field manager, Office Operation Supervisor, or Office Clerk. They will tell you how they have to fight the software to get their job done.
Truth is the Census could be done with half the people. There is plain incompetence in middle and higher management. Those making decision on software and marketing seem to have no understanding of the job those in local offices do. It is so bad local offices don't really have an accurate idea who even is still employed in the field working cases.
Why doesn't this change? Nobody wants to lose their job. Middle management wants numbers and to hit goals. It doesn't matter if the numbers are actually accurate. Often they will not be. Notes about cases (organizations we are trying to count their people/or individual housing units) pile up inside systems that nobody has time to read. It is easier to close a case then actually resolve it and accurately count people.
Not only is there no incentive to do the job correctly, it will actually get you in trouble if you do things right.
Yes this is a random throwaway account on HN. But to verify just ask nearly anyone who works for the Census. I hope to post more on this later when I have time. Feel free to ask any questions.
LOL. That's a new level !
Is that being discussed? Would be a good way to get away from the 10 year lag data and have real time information to make policy choices.
Successful measurement requires collecting good, accurate data.
Sabotaging the census is tantamount to sabotaging the government's ability to run the country.
It's the sort of thing that in my mind should be able to happen only in poorly-run countries managed by corrupt regimes.
The leading statistician claiming that the census is being sabotaged, Robert Santos, was recently elected as President of the American Statistical Association. We should probably take his claims seriously.
I find it almost unbelievable that this is happening in the United States of America.
The only difference is that now the aggrieved bureaucrats have a receptive audience in credulous journalists who are always ready to write a story about how the current administration is "ending democracy" if they don't do exactly what the bureaucrats want. So you would expect right wing media doing stories on how the military, the VA or the border patrol is underfunded or has had excessive "political interference" during Democrat administrations, and left wing media (which is 95% of the "mainstream" media on the US) would be expected to say the same about different parts of the government with a republican administration.
Just normal politics at work - doesn't mean the stories aren't important, but let's keep things in context.
More cynically it’s been really politicised and not doing it this year would risk the Democrats being in power to do it next year.
Being in the country's constitution does make it difficult to delay.
>In instances where the bureau is unsure of the number of residents at an address after a field visit, its population characteristics are inferred from its nearest similar neighbor (hot-deck imputation). This practice has effects across many areas, but is seen by some as controversial.[6] However, the practice was ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Utah v. Evans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census#Procedure
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que...
Counting illegal immigrants in the census helps Democrats because liberal states have more of them. This is just a fact. You may think we should still count as many of them in the census, that's fine. But don't pretend there is no issue with one side of the argument.
Mentioning motives of one side but not the other is naive. It also prevents us from having a real conversation about the trade offs at hand.
When deviating from the mandate, it's important to consider motives. When aligning with the mandate, unless it's clear that the mandate is ill-formed (which it isn't in this case for the reasons I've given above), motives for enforcing the mandate are, as said above, irrelevant.
Now if Democrats were trying to increase census coverage in Florida, Texas, NY, and IL while playing games to get census takers to skip traversing the vast emptiness of Montana and Wyoming, I’d agree that you have a point. But that’s not the case.
Essentially the vote of two US citizens does not count equally if you count everyone.
If one lives in an area with more illegal immigrants, that US citizens votes foe him/her but also for the non voters in the area. This is not a ‘one person one vote’ situation and it’s a real concern if you believe in equal representation.
Ideally you’d have a citizenship question and you count only citizens for electoral college allocation and everyone for non electoral college matters. But that creates concerns of undercounting etc.
It's not just about the vote. Redistricting is one aspect of it, sure, but it's not the sole reason a census is done.
It's done primarily to predict tax revenues, predict infrastructure needs, predict growth patterns, support municipal planning, etc., all of which are necessities for projects that often span decades.
If you're concerned about the vote, deal with the challenge posed by the electoral college instead. The Census is used for too many other things to be manipulated for the sake of political interests by one party.
Are you mad that the census counts children too? They don't vote either. Would you favor the census skipping children? Should the census count people who don't regularly vote? How about felons denied the right to vote? People judged too mentally incompetent to vote? Just who all are you willing to not count?
This is a good point.
Should a district be penalized because their constituents chose to have more kids per family unit than others? Their voting power would go down in the interim, wouldn't it?
Thanks for raising the argument - it does a good job of showing why tying the census to voting power is meaningless.
And let’s be real - I find it pretty unlikely the constitution and 14th Amendment were written with massive amounts of illegal aliens being in the country in mind. Should we count tourists from other countries as well?
If you don’t count tourists, why would you count migrants who are supposedly going back to their home country? Maybe tourists who are here for 6 months would be analogous.
But, TBH, I don't really care much about their motives, because in a democracy we should be trying to get the most eligible people as possible to vote. Republicans are trying to prevent people from voting because they believe the more voting is expanded, the harder it is to get a majority of people to vote for them. Well, tough shit.
To see what has happened in Texas, with dropboxes limited to one-per-county, I feel like the previous argument against voter fraud has kind of gone out the window, and now it's just blatant - there is no rational reason the giant county that contains Houston should be limited to the same number of dropboxes as a rural county with orders of magnitude fewer people.
How this then translates into policy is an entirely different question, but essentially misrepresenting what should be objective reality for cheap political points is asking for trouble. A bit like closing your eyes: it doesn't make things go away.
It should also include the average amount of tourists (steady state) so that the presence of more people in an area get sufficient resources (to serve citizens and non-citizens alike).
An ulterior motive would be expressing support for a counting method with a statement about the technical superiority of the method, but really preferring it because of some bias inherent in it. The "ulterior" part comes from the motivation being different than what is publicly expressed.
I was skeptical about this so I looked it up. Nevada and Texas are the top 2 states on a per capita basis. I'd hardly call those liberal states.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauth...
If we were not the superpower country, we would have already got "sanctions" but no one can yet. But the next time America sanctions other countries for human rights or governance, rest assured they will laugh it off.
However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills.
Part of the sophistry is pretending that no non-white people are capable of responding to documents mailed to them and as such will be entirely disenfranchised. However, the actual percentage simply cannot be that high as 73 percent of households have satellite or cable TV and thus are at least occasionally responding to mailed documents. 73 percent of the population isn't even white anymore.
I mean, yeah, as a political purity test we can rally around Orange Man Bad and try to one up each other in our two minutes hate to eliminate diversity of opinion while encouraging groupthink, but reality is so far from the politics in this particular situation that its hard to play along. And if an individual can't stomach the extreme virtue signallers, may as well join the reality-based community and just vote Trump. So ironically I don't think this topic is a PRODUCTIVE purity test even from a purely leftist perspective.
It's impossible to read a comment about the census without looking at the political affiliation of who makes the comment.
It's also unfortunately that articles like this don't make these affiliations clear. Gives fuel to 'fake news' and 'liberal media' arguments.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1988-06-12/news/mn-7095_1_urban-...
"essentially 100%" is an overstatement. Federal Reserve data (see e.g. Figure 12 here [1]) consistently shows that quite a few Americans have difficulty paying bills. For example, ~25% of surveyed Americans with a high school degree or less said they couldn't pay that month's bills. That number gets smaller with more education but is always 50-100% larger for black and Hispanic people.
It seems reasonable to me that people juggling various overdue bills might not prioritize responding to a census that has 0 short-term positive impact. It also seems reasonable to me that we make an extra effort to count these people since the point of the census is to count everybody, not just people who are easy to count.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-we...
So to retype what you said more correctly. "I wish the Republicans would realize they are destroying..."
This sounds more like institutional interests being defended by those who work in the institution that is forced to be more efficient. Many will complain, and scream exaggerated warnings. But in the end, it will help to make things better.
And I wish people would stop saying 'both sides' when it's 95% only one side. That's the issue. One side is now against census so people aren't represented, restricting voting so people don't get a say, and people keep saying 'both sides'.
People have built-in game theory enough to be highly sensitive to others trying to set up unequal enforcement.
Remember, when the country was formed immigration wasn’t some complex thing you just showed up. Picture an immigration official trying to turn back a ship full of slaves because they where undocumented or missing paperwork. Meanwhile they still counted as 3/5th person in the official count.
I began immigration to the US under a Democratic administration and finished it at the end of a Democratic controlled Congress and another Democratic administration. It was consistently a badly run, non-sensical process. So FOH with claims that Democrats would like a country with open borders or that they're much better at running a sane process.
And even if those things were their policy, if the bureaucracy is still the same, what difference does it really make? The article concerns itself with links between how a bureaucracy is run and policies. This thread of conversation deals with people's faith in a "system".
That's not the point. The Supreme Court was convinced by the evidence presented (statements on record by people in the current administration) that the intend of the citizenship question was to reduce the count of people with illegal immigration status. So the question was intended to undermine the primary purpose of the census as mandated by the constitution: counting all the people.
for example, the Democrats could say "we understand some electoral college votes will be indirectly allocated to illegal immigrants, we also understand that because liberal states have more illegal immigrants it will help the left more than the right, but that's the price to pay for counting every actual US citizen."
The republicans could say, 'we want to make sure only US citizens count in terms of votes, and we will lose some actual US citizens plus we will undercount illegal immigrants (which is useful in other, non voting related ways) in order to ensure that.'
Then we can have a conversation. The way this dialog is being had, with liberal statisticians making 'scientific arguments' and republicans attacking electoral integrity is just a mess.
If you look at something like https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauth... and sort the list any way you want: There are several reliable D/R states with almost no undocumented immigrant population, and several D/R states with 3%+.
It might impact gerrymandering efforts, which gets even more complicated and again without a clear winner unless you have a preliminary version of the data to work with.
Honestly, I dislike what’s being done due to optics more than politics.
Legislators can change that through legislation. They're not supposed to sabotage the accuracy of the census.
If both sides erode your faith in the system, I suspect it's because you see real problems that need to be solved, but the people "elected to solve them" are instead constrained by these games.
Speaking of systems--can you clarify what about the electoral college system you support, and perhaps cite either some systemic features/biases/incentives you think it corrects for, or perhaps some points in U.S. history where you think the electoral college system improved overall outcomes?
> I think the "Great Compromise" helps correct for the fact that people in different locations value different things and have different experiences. People who live in farming communities understand plenty of things that people in cities don't and vice-versa.
This phrasing feels like a platitude that can justify any distribution of electoral-college power we feel like creating. Can you clarify how it "corrects" for people having different locations/values/experiences?
Maybe it helps to focus on narrower questions like: Do you feel like the current winner-take-all allocation in most states or proportional allocation as used in Nebraska and Maine either uphold or undermine the values you're describing here?
> ...it's an agreement that was reached between states who were giving up their sovereignty to join together. If we discard compromises like that because people who won the popular vote by a tiny margin now think it's outdated and that they have some democratic mandate, then collectively society has lost my trust to keep it's word on future compromises wherein I'm asked to forfeit some of my independence and sovereignty.
This feels a little unfair...
1. States made a compromise of some sovereignty to join, but the compromise was very much about protecting significant parts of that sovereignty. The states, quite pointedly, retain the sovereignty to modify the compromise. If the electoral college is discarded, it will be because states exercised their sovereignty, via this process, to do so.
2. Following the above, minus a few stipulations, each state legislature retains broad power regarding how their electors are selected and what they are expected to do. Something like the Fair Vote proposal entails exercising this sovereignty.
It's clearly spelled out in the constitution that it should be an accurate count of all people.
People not eligible to vote (non-citizens, mostly slaves) were explicitly intended to be included by design.
If you want that to be different, there is a process for that, and that's a constitutional amendment.
When I say both sides, I mean both sides. Gerrymandering to give minorities districts for example does the same thing to undermine people’s faith in the system. The goal should be to outlaw gerrymandering not find some way to allow it to be useful politically.
Should people in DC maintain the right to vote? IMO they should, but it’s become a political issue not a democracy issue.
I am not saying you can’t play the game. It’s a terrible idea to split your states votes while the electoral collage is in it’s current form. Acknowledging this is how things are, and we should come up with a better solution is fine. Fighting each issue separately isn’t.
> Should people in DC maintain the right to vote? IMO they should, but it’s become a political issue not a democracy issue.
Only in the 21st century do voting issues only become political when they can be looked at in terms of race.
"Political" means about the process of governance, not "when minorities or women have a complaint."
However, this idea that districts should be advantageous to some group is inherently corrosive to the idea of democracy. You can’t have your cake and eat it to, either districts need to be arbitrary lines drawn without political influence or your just deciding what influences are allowed.
PS: Packing means these districts can also be used to hurt democrats by creating a single district with extreme bias you can create several safe districts which would otherwise be contested.
Precisely one party is proposing laws and suits that push in this direction.
Of course congressional representation for DC is a political issue. Framing this as an issue of democracy doesn't tell the whole story. DC is a federal district and by design has no representation in Congress. This was a political decision.
Congressional action to grant DC statehood outright has no precedent and seemingly goes against the constitution. If residents of DC want the same congressional representation as states, then retrocession to return parts of DC to Maryland or Virginia is the main constitutionally viable option - this has been done before. Congress granting DC statehood outright would be a misuse of their power. This whole thing is rife with politics.
Playing the hypothetical harm issue is kind of laughing in the face of democracy as an idea. They don’t even have final say in local laws.
Why such unpopular options can make the cut is people don’t care about issues equally. When a significant minority care a lot about one issue they get patched together with other such groups and you can get elected even if most people disagree with the majority of what you stand for.
Over time identity politics eventually confuses things as people constantly supporting one party tend to adopt the stances of that party. This gets interesting when parties swap position on some issue.
When asked if pro-choice/pro-life, Americans are pretty evenly split.[1]
So as per the OP’s comment, which issues are so strongly supported that only party clearly supports them?
Gun control? No.
Welfare reform? No.
Higher spending? No.
I’m genuinely curious.
60% think gun laws should be more strict, 11% think they should be less strict.
Welfare reform and lower spending are not strictly Republican platforms. Reform isn’t a specific policy decision. Also, Republican administrations have seen some of the largest spending increases. Being a believer in small government, free markets, and zero debt I don’t have a clear party favorite.
EX: I firmly believe there should be zero subsides for any industry, as such rebates for installing solar is a bad idea. Flat carbon tax and let the market decide, if “clean” coal can win then it wins.