Data collectors race clock against tighter deadline

Amid an unprecedented pandemic, the job of a census taker going door-to-door to count every last person was already going to be difficult.

But after the U.S. Census Bureau shortened its deadline by a full month, doorknockers are having to work even harder to make sure Florida doesn’t lose out on millions of dollars in funding and perhaps even a congressional seat because of a severe undercount.

An accurate Florida number also is in danger because of a controversial proposal by the Trump administration to estimate the number of undocumented immigrants and delete them from the official count, a practice many legal experts say is counter to the agency’s constitutional task of counting “all persons.”

U.S. Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham said his decision to cut short the deadline for in-person counts from Oct. 31 to Sept. 30 was to “accelerate the completion of data collection and apportionment counts by our statutory deadline of December 31, 2020.”

The White House had initially said they would ask for a longer timeframe for the count, said Steven Romalewski, a census expert who is director of the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research. “But, either because Congress has not yet agreed to that, or for other reasons, we don’t know why, the White House reneged on that proposal.”

There are two major problems with the shortened deadline, Romalewski said. “In everything I’ve read, [the Census Bureau] said they need the full 10 weeks to do the door-knocking follow up . ... But that’s [ just] the first step.”

The bureau also has to double-check the numbers, account for people they’ve missed and make sure there are no duplicates, and “that time period is now substantially truncated as well,” he said. “So it’s overall a worrisome situation.”

Following up: The door-knocking operation, also known as “nonresponse followup,” visits homes where residents haven’t already filled out forms online or through the mail.

In Florida, the self-response rate was 60.1% when door-knocking began on Aug. 9, almost 3 percentage points behind where it was at the same period in 2010.

In Central Florida, Orange County was more than 2 points behind its 2010 selfresponse rate, at 59.8%. Lake County was at 60.8% compared with 2010’s 65.2%.

Seminole and Osceola counties were actually slightly ahead of where they were in 2010. But even those numbers aren’t ideal.

“Osceola County has a 53.8% response rate now [compared to] 52.7% in 2010,” Romalewski said. “So it’s a little better . ... However, 53 or 54% is still pretty low. And that means that more than 40% of the housing units still need to be contacted in person.”

The places with the biggest undercount tend to be in largely minority neighborhoods, he said, areas that can be severely hurt by lower federal funding for social and other services and less political clout after redistricting, he said.

Medicare, Medicaid, housing programs, and highway funding all are allocated to states and counties based on census numbers.

In Orange County, heavily African American areas west of Orlando and South Apopka were as much as 14 percentage points behind where they were when doorknocking began in 2010, and it was a similar situation in Sanford, Eustis and other minority areas.

“We’re very concerned that without the additional time, especially given the challenges of the pandemic, the Census Bureau is going to have a hard time making sure that there is a fair and accurate count, especially for those groups,” Romalewski said.

‘Recruit, hire, train’: The bureau still maintains it will get a full count done in time.

If there’s an earlier deadline to reach every non-responding home, said Marilyn Stephens, assistant regional census manager for the Atlanta region which includes Florida, then they’ll just have to work harder and hire more people.

“There’s a constant, ‘recruit, hire, train,’” Stephens said. “We have people calling every day, ‘Can I still apply for a census job?’ And the answer is yes.”

Those new hires will be immediately put into the field following a background check, where they’ll be joined by census takers already knocking on doors.

According to the employment website Indeed, census takers in Florida average about $16.54 an hour.

“We had to revise our training modules, of course, because of COVID-19,” Stephens said.

All census takers will wear masks, have hand sanitizer, and conduct their interviews outside while practicing social distancing.

And if there’s no one at home, they’ll leave a notice on the door telling residents they’ll be back unless they fill out the form online, over the phone or by mail.

“Even though we’re knocking on doors, that part doesn’t stop,” Stephens said of self-response. “We have to account for every household in the nation. So if an area has a 50% self-response rate, then we’ve got a follow up with 50% of the households. If they have an 80% response rate, we follow the 20% to get to 100%.”

An undercount could also affect the state’s recovery from COVID-19, if, for example, not enough vaccines are allocated to an area.

“Everything depends on that, even in the pandemic,” said Melvin Pittman, the chair of the Orange County Complete Count Committee, at an event Tuesday. “All the money coming back from Washington, a lot of [it] is based on census data.”

“It’s so important,” Pittman said. “And it would also preclude a census taker coming to your door.”