Being counted

New Yorkers jumped a major hurdle earlier this year when President Trump backed down on his horrible plans to force a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Monday, we learned we’d cleared another, when the federal Census Bureau, which is asking Americans for the first time to answer the decennial survey online rather than on paper, revealed it would still send paper questionnaires, some in Spanish, to many of the estimated 476,000 New York City households lacking internet access. More obstacles lie ahead.

Paper notices directing people to answer questions are being mailed out in just two languages: English and Spanish. That means hundreds of thousands of other New Yorkers, including Southeast Asian, Asian, Francophone, Albanian and Russian-speaking people are getting notified about the census through mailers they won’t be able to read.

Surveys can be filled out online or in print in any of 12 different languages. But federal mailers explaining that those options exist are in English or Spanish alone.

This is where city and state officials must step up, by focusing some of the tens of millions they’ve allocated to community groups to ensure New Yorkers, be they Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Korean, Croatian or other learn how to fill out the forms, fast.

Clock’s ticking. The first forms reach mailboxes in 115 days.

New research shows just how much is at stake: 316 federal spending programs relied on census data to disburse more than $1.5 trillion in funding in the 2017 budget year, far more than previously estimated.

This isn’t a drill. This counts.