Census takers say they were told to enter 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 officials 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.