Our view: Sped-up count is a recipe for inaccuracy
President Donald Trump has shown a unique talent for politicizing or mismanaging respected institutions such as the Postal Service and Voice of America. So perhaps it's no surprise that he's also at risk of botching the once-a-decade census.
Counting "the whole number of persons in each state" — as presidents are constitutionally required to do every 10 years — would have been difficult for any leader during a pandemic. And when the nation partially shut down in March as the coronavirus spread, the Census Bureau suspended field operations.
The following month, Trump prudently asked Congress for permission to delay providing final numbers until April 30, 2021. Those numbers are used to apportion 435 House of Representatives seats by population, draw the lines of state legislative districts, and allocate $1.5 trillion in federal assistance annually.
But then Trump's ideological obsession with unauthorized residents took center stage. The Supreme Court had previously rejected an ill-conceived administration proposal to include a citizenship question on the Census, a move that certainly would have discouraged participation in the counting. So in July, Trump announced that he would strip out of the final Census anyone deemed an unauthorized resident based on cross-checking names with existing government records.
To ensure that he could accomplish this before the end of his term, Trump needed to speed up the census. Last month, that's exactly what he ordered. The Census Bureau announced it would end collection of data by Sept. 30 rather than the original deadline of Oct. 31, a full month ahead of schedule — and do all of that while scrambling to make up for months of pandemic-related delay.
It's a recipe for inaccuracy. Census workers not only need to find and count, by the end of this month, tens of millions of people who failed to respond to initial bureau queries, but they also need to do this amid a 35% attrition rate as federal canvassers quit for fear of contracting the coronavirus. After data collection comes the critical and now-truncated task of processing — fact-checking numbers and identifying duplicate or incomplete responses.
"A compressed review period creates risk for serious errors not being discovered in the data — thereby significantly decreasing data quality," says an internal Census Bureau report that surfaced Wednesday. "Additionally, serious errors discovered in the data may not be fixed due to the lack of time to research and understand the root cause or to re-run and re-review one or multiple state files."
J. Christopher Mihm, a managing director for the Government Accountability Office who is monitoring the Census Bureau's efforts, said that "conducting an accurate and complete once-a-decade count of an increasingly diverse population was always going to be extremely challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic and the recent census schedule changes have made it even more difficult to get the count right."
There are legal challenges to block Trump from excluding undocumented residents from the final census count. Red and blue states alike risk losing representation in Congress. And Congress ought to extend to April the deadline for accepting any final numbers.
The Census has gotten better with each passing decade, achieving a 99.9% accurate count in 2010. It would be a shame if the Trump administration, through incompetence or political malice, reverses that progress.