The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, Oct. 13, halted the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident from continuing through the end of October, dealing a blow to local organizations pushing to finish their work.
President Donald Trump’s administration had asked the nation’s high court to suspend a district court order permitting the 2020 census to continue through the end of the month. The Trump administration argued that the head count needed to end immediately so the U.S. Census Bureau will have enough time to crunch the numbers before a year-end deadline for turning in figures used to decide how many congressional seats each state gets.
This is the latest twist in the census count process, which has taken a number of sharp turns in a year confronted by a global pandemic, nationwide protests over racial injustice and a contentious presidential election.
A moving target
A coalition of local governments and civil rights groups had sued the Trump administration, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the count ended early. They said the census schedule was cut short to accommodate a July order from Trump that would exclude people in the country illegally from the numbers, which also are used to decide how federal funding is dispersed to states.
In a dissent, Justice Sonya Sotamayor wrote that “meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying, especially when the Government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress.”
Last month, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, sided with the plaintiffs and issued an injunction that suspended a Sept. 30 deadline to finish the 2020 census and a Dec. 31 deadline to submit numbers used to determine how many congressional seats each state gets, a process known as apportionment. That caused the deadlines to revert back to a previous Census Bureau plan that had field operations ending Oct. 31 and the reporting of apportionment figures at the end of April 2021.
When the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the statistical agency, picked an Oct. 5 end date, Koh struck that down, too, accusing officials of “lurching from one hasty, unexplained plan to the next … and undermining the credibility of the Census Bureau and the 2020 Census.”
A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Koh’s order allowing the census to continue through October, but struck down the part that suspended the Dec. 31 deadline to turn in apportionment numbers. The panel of three appellate judges said that just because the year-end deadline is impossible to meet doesn’t mean the court should require the Census Bureau to miss it.
Fears of a flawed census
The end date for the census has been a moving target causing significant frustration and anxiety among grassroots organizations that have been trying to get the word out, especially in hard-to-count communities, said Sarah Middleton, census consultant with Charitable Ventures in Costa Mesa, which partners with several nonprofits in the area.
“This was supposed to be a nonpartisan headcount, which has become so political,” she said. “This yo-yo effect has been heartbreaking. We’re going to have an inaccurate count for 2020 and we’re going to have to live with that for the next 10 years.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the self-response rate in California as of Oct. 12 was 69.4%. Most states, including California have an 99.9% enumeration rate, close to a perfect count. But that only means that the Census Bureau, either through self-response or by knocking on doors, was able to contact 99.9% of the households, said Paul Ong, director of UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge.
“My main concern is about the accuracy of the count — whether or not people have been included,” he said. “The fact that 99.9% of households were reached does not mean the data is accurate.”
Two additional weeks could have made a difference, especially in assessing problematic data and improving the quality of the data, Ong said.
“But that would still not solve the flaws we see in the census,” he said. “It’s an important battle for us to fight in the future. Is our goal to count everyone, to be inclusive. As a principle and in a symbolic way, it’s important to establish that fact.”
For local organizations that have worked long and hard to get the word out to difficult-to-count communities, the Supreme Court ruling means the count would come come to a hard stop, even though the stop date still remains murky.
Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer released a statement Tuesday saying that the Supreme Court’s decision will result in a less accurate census, one that is “unduly predicated on guesswork, rather than actual counting — with fair representation and crucial federal funding at risk for cities like Los Angeles.”
“While we’re disappointed, our fight is not over,” he said. “The stakes are too high for the matter to end here.”
Feuer and a national coalition sued the Trump administration in August over its last-minute decision to compress more than eight months of data collection and processing into just over four months. This four-month reduction would make it impossible to count every person, both in Los Angeles and across the nation, Feuer’s statement said.
Organizers frustrated
Groups in Southern California have been scrambling to get an accurate census count, even as an uncertain deadline loomed.
D’Andre Lampkin, co-chairman of Ontario’s complete count committee, was moving furniture and laying out census materials at his nonprofit’s office in preparation for a census open house set for Thursday when he heard about the Supreme Court decision. But now, that event won’t take place, he said.
The good news is Ontario, a city that is 70 percent Latino, has achieved a 71% self-response rate. Lampkin had set a 65% goal earlier in the year.
“Through the hard work of the Ontario Complete Count Committee and our volunteers, we’ve exceeded our goal,” he said.
James Breitling, who chairs Upland’s Complete Count Committee, told the City Council on Monday night he was making a final push these next few weeks, promising $20 gift cards to anyone who brings a confirmation code to him at City Hall proving they filled out the census questionnaire. But that won’t happen either. Upland’s self-response rate is 77.3%, third in San Bernardino County. Breitling said he was hoping to make a push to get his city into second place by the end of the month.
Making the census end date a moving target has led to confusion, said Sky Allen, census coordinator for Inland Empowerment, a coalition of community organizations in the Inland Empire.
“It has made it a lot more challenging for us,” she said. “The good news is we’ve already surpassed our 2010 numbers. Even with the pandemic, we were able to get more people to fill out the questionnaires than the last time and we’re proud of that.”
While the pandemic and protests over the past few months forced groups to pivot and find creative ways to reach communities, it has also encouraged community groups to have deeper conversations, Allen said.
“The protests, for example, allowed us to talk about civic engagement as an ecosystem as opposed to a singular act,” she said. “Voting, the census, protests — these are all forms of civic engagement. They are all necessary for a thriving democracy.”
Two weeks can make a difference
Ending the count abruptly means there will be less complete data, especially “when it comes to having a detailed understanding of the resident population of California,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, director of the UC Riverside’s Center for Social Innovation and director of the Inland Empire Census Complete Count Committee.
“When you have more time, you are more likely to have information about demographic characteristics of people such as age, gender and race,” he said. “The (Trump administration) is showing a desire to rush this through to get the data to Congress before the end of the year, regardless of how flawed it may be.”
The Supreme Court’s decision is unfortunate because it hampers the ability of the Census Bureau to complete a full count, said Bey-Ling Sha, dean of the College of Communications at Cal State Fullerton, who worked at the Census Bureau from 1999 to 2004. Sha said the Census Bureau has a constitutional mandate to count 100% of the U.S. population, and its ability to fulfill that mandate is in jeopardy.
“Two weeks is still a lot of time because of the scale of the operation, given the numbers involved, the complexity of the operation and all of the different kinds of populations that need to be counted,” she said. “Having the time to do that is really important. It’s unfortunate that the accuracy of the census will be jeopardized.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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