End of an era counting nation through census?
Bureau hints at blended approach to collect data
Beyond the reports of undercounts and overcounts in population totals, there is another takeaway from the post-mortem of 2020 census data issued Thursday: This could be the last census of its kind.
The next census will be taken in a nation where Amazon may have a better handle on where many people live than the Census Bureau itself. For some advocates of a more accurate count, the era in which census-takers knock on millions of doors to persuade people to fill out forms should give way in 2030 to a sleeker approach: data mining, surveys, sophisticated statistical projections and, if politics allows, even help from the nation’s tech giants and their endless petabytes of personal information.
The Census Bureau has yet to leap very far into that new era. But it has hinted recently at a “blended” approach in which official census figures could be supplemented with reliable data from government records and other sources.
That would depart from the long-standing model in which the population tally, taken once every 10 years, was the marker for everything that followed, even if it was long outdated by year six or seven.
“The model we have been using since 1790,” when the first census was conducted, “has run its course,” said Kenneth Prewitt, the Columbia University scholar who oversaw the 2000 census. “There’s an amazing amount of work going on about how to improve census forms, to use alternate data sets and administrative records, about working with other places that have a lot of data.”
Businesses and researchers have been using those techniques for years, if not decades. But while some changes in the census seem inevitable, how much is an open issue.
The Census Bureau has stuck with more traditional survey work in part because of legal constraints; a 1999 Supreme Court ruling barred the bureau from using statistical estimates in population counts to reapportion seats in the House of Representatives. But politicians, experts, local governments and industries that consume Census Bureau data worry that seizing on data from other sources without vetting it could make the bureau’s snapshots of the nation less accurate, not more.
The bureau considered tapping secondhand sources like state records to fine-tune its 2020 portraits of the population, but it often shied away unless it could find corroborating information elsewhere, according to Amy O’Hara, a former Census Bureau official who is now the executive director of the Federal Statistical Research Data Center at Georgetown University.
O’Hara said the gusher of public and available data opens new avenues to a more accurate census, but only if the numbers can be proven accurate and the Census Bureau can navigate the tricky boundary between tapping private research and issuing public statistics.
The 2020 Census streamlined the process by moving most of the form-filling to the internet and equipping census workers with iPhones and census-taking apps. Online forms proved a resounding success, census officials say, because they were easier, cheaper and quicker to process.
Yet despite those improvements, the share of residents who opted to complete census forms remained stuck at twothirds of all households, where it has sat stubbornly for four decades. The nonresponse follow-up, known as NRFU, of the remaining one-third, conducted by census workers, was hamstrung by hurricanes, forest fires, political interference and rising suspicion of the government among partisans on the political right and among racial and ethnic groups.
Steve Jost, a former senior census official who is a consultant to the Census Project, a group advocating a more accurate count, lamented that. Tracking down nonresponders eats up roughly half the cost of each census, he said, yet the census still fails to reach 2 percent to 3 percent of households.
“That disproportionately impacts communities of color,” he said. “How long are we going to beat our heads against it?” The bureau needs to do something new, he added.