Chaotic census could harm Harris County
After survey ends abruptly, officials worry about losing millions in funding due to undercount
The census came to an abrupt halt Thursday after a pandemic and a legal tug- of-war threw the massive survey into chaos. Officials around the country now fear they’ll lose their fair share of federal funding and political representation due to an incomplete count.
A George Washington University study indicates that a mere 1 percent undercount for Texas by the U.S. Census Bureau would amount to $290 million less per year in federal revenue. A lowerthan-anticipated count in urban areas could also mean one or two fewer congressional seats and fewer electoral votes for the state, aswell as a smaller share of free lunches, Medicaid and HUD dollars.
Houston is among a handful of gateway cities with growing immigrant populations that are most vulnerable to being undercounted, said Lloyd Potter, the state demographer for Texas. Low-income people, children, renters, people of color and immigrants are among the least counted; their communities then are underrepresented in government and must make dowith less funding.
One in four Texans — more than 6 million people — live in hard-to- count communities, according to a 2019 report by the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based nonpartisan organization.
Because of the pandemic, schools missed out on helping families fill out the census in the spring and fall, said Robert Long, a former school principal who is now the west Houston advocacy
director for Raise Your Hand Texas. Undercounting can reduce funding for low-income students through Title I programs that reduce class size and offer afterschool programs and meals.
“The money doesn’t come through but the same amount of kids showup and you’re asked to do more with less,” he said.
Some of the harshest consequences are for childrenwho live in undercounted school districts. According to Count All Kids, a group of children’s organizations, the 2010 census undercounted children 5 and younger by 5 percent, resulting in a $119 million loss in federal funding each year for the next decade.
Justices to hear plan
By most estimates, Texas is on track to gain three congressional seats — more than any other state, said Richard Murray, a University ofHouston political scientist specializing in Texas and U.S. electoral politics. But if there is a significant undercount and the Trump administration excludes people living in the country illegally, two of those new seats could be lost.
Several experts said the census count is only as good as the underlying ground operation and community outreach. The key is that participants have basic trust in government, which was further diminished this cycle by immigrants’ concerns about the citizenship question the Trump administration tried and ultimately failed to include in the census. Trump followed up in July saying he planned to exercise his judgment and exclude people living in the country illegally from the country’s inhabitants in the final tally he submits to Congress.
The administration faced multiple federal lawsuits over the exclusion proposal . The Supreme Court saidFriday that itwouldreview the Trump plan.
The White House was also sued when it shortened the extended Oct. 31 deadline it set in the spring because of the pan
demic. The plaintiffs surmised the administration wanted counting to be done earlier so that it could hand over a count that excluded unauthorized immigrants by Dec. 31.
The Supreme Court stayed a lower court order to keep the end-of-month deadline, effectively allowing the Census Bu
reau to end counting on Oct. 15. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in a lone dissent that “the harms associated with an inaccurate census are avoidable and intolerable.” Even a fraction of a percent of the nation’s households amounts to hundreds of thousands of people left uncounted, she said.
‘Perfect storm of challenges’
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is among an array of local officials who have encouraged people all year to respond to the census, but the pandemic and confusion over deadlines hampered many efforts at outreach.
“I think it’s vital we recognize we’re in a dire condition,” Jackson Lee said during a last-minute plea outside the student-free Blackshear Elementary campus on Thursday morning.
“It’s such a huge logistical problem counting every person in the country and to have all these problems thrown in the spokes, it’s been very difficult,” said Potter, who also runs the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “This particular year there is a perfect storm of challenges for an undercount.”
Others who study the census agreed, saying it could yield surprisingly low totals.
“This is going to be the most problem-plagued census in modern times,” saidMurray, the political scientist. On the front end, there was the obstacle of people who didn’t want to open their doors to enumerators amid a public health crisis. The nextmajor obstacle is that once the data is collected, he said, we’re facing “a rogue political administration that’s unprecedentedly messing with the census to try to get it to give their party more power going forward.”
Other data used
Census totals can be deceiving, experts said. While census officials have repeatedly said that 99.9 percent of the population has been counted, less than 63 percent of Harris County and Texas residents responded on their own. In 2010, Harris County had a 65 percent self-response rate and Texas’wasmore than 64 percent. Door knockers make up some of the difference, trying up to six times at each non-responsive door. But the censusworkers also use proxies, like asking a neighbor or landlord for their best guesses. The rest gets filled in using administrative data — from Social Security, the IRS, Medicare and other agencies — which demographers say provides a far less precise count.
Both Houston and Harris County are reporting that 37.3 percent of the populationwas accounted for this year by enumerators, who knocked on doors and made determinations when people didn’t answer them.
Steven Romalewski, who runs a Hard to Countmapping project at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, said how much of that 37.3 percent was actual counting of households is a giant question mark. “The question is how well did they account for themthrough the door knocking operation. We don’t know. It’s frustrating tome and all the other demographers in the country.”
In prior decades, he said, “We’ve basically trusted the Census Bureau to do the best they can, but this time that trust has been hurt by the administration tying to undermine the census at every turn.”