‘It was all a sham. I felt terrible, terrible’
Census takers were told to put down false information
Two census takers told
The Associated Press that their supervisors pressured them to enter false information into a computer system about homes they had not visited so they could close cases during the waning days of the once-a-decade national headcount.
Maria Arce said her supervisor in Massachusetts offered step-by-step instructions in how to trick the system.
She said she felt guilty about lying, but she did not want to disobey her supervisors, who kept repeating that they were under pressure from a regional office in New York to close cases.
“It was all a sham. I felt terrible, terrible. I knew I was lying. I knew I was doing something wrong, but they said, ‘No, no, we are closing. We have to do this,’“Arce said.
At the time, in mid- to late September, census workers were drawing close to a deadline imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration to finish the count by the end of the month.
Indiana census taker Pam Roberts’ supervisor pressured her to make up answers about households where no one was home.
Roberts agreed to do it for only one day — making up information on about two dozen households — before refusing to continue the next day because she believed it was wrong.
She said she entered made-up answers while in her car outside the homes since the mobile device used for data entry could track where a person was when making an entry.
“That’s not what this is about. If it’s not truthful, how can we use it?“Roberts, who lives in Lafayette, Indiana, said in an interview.
Asked about the workers’ statements to the AP, the Census Bureau said it
was looking into the allegations, but the agency did not provide further details.
The census takers shared their experiences with the AP as a coalition of local governments and advocacy groups wages a battle in federal court over the accuracy of the 2020 census. A lawsuit filed in California challenged the decision by the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, to speed up deadlines so that the count would end in September.
The coalition argued that the shortened timeline would cause minority communities to be undercounted in the data used to determine the number of congressional seats in each state.
A judge ruled that the count could continue through the end of October and that census offi
cials could continue crunching the numbers through April 2021. But the Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the administration and allowed census field operations to end in mid- October.
An appellate court suspended the judge’s order on the deadline for the numbers to be used for congressional representation. That issue is still being litigated.
The coalition that filed the lawsuit said the deadline was changed to ensure that the number crunching would take place while Trump was still in office, no matter the outcome of the presidential race.
That would guarantee the enforcement of an order Trump issued in July seeking to exclude people who are in the country illegally from the numbers used to determine the distribution of congressional seats.
Trump’s order has been found unlawful and unconstitutional by three courts — in New York, California and Maryland. The Justice Department is appealing.
After the Supreme Court decision, the local governments and advocacy groups documented other cases in which census takers were instructed to falsify information or cut corners in order to finish the count.
Under federal law, Census Bureau employees who make false statements can be fined up to $2,000 and imprisoned for up to five years.
But census workers are rarely prosecuted for falsification of census responses since the Census Bureau is more concerned with identifying fraud and correcting mistakes than pursuing legal penalties, said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who specializes in the census.
During the 2010 census, two managers in a Brooklyn census office were fired for instructing workers to falsify questionnaires, requiring around 4,220 households to be recounted.
Each time a national census winds down, the more difficult homes to count “tend to generate a greater incidence of falsification,“the bureau’s watchdog agency, the Office of Inspector General, said in a 2010 report.
For this year’s census, the Office of Inspector General, says it’s evaluating the quality of the data collected.
So far, statisticians have not uncovered anything that raises red flags, Ron Jarmin, the Census Bureau’s deputy director, said Thursday in a blog post.