Counting the nation could turn to other sources in next census

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 itself 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which the population tally, taken once every 10 years, was the marker for everything that followed, even if it was long outdated by year six or seven.

While some changes in the census seem inevitable, how much remains 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.

It is an article of faith among data experts and the Census Bureau itself that data obtained directly from people are more reliable than secondhand or thirdhand data from other sources. And experts are wary that other data can raise privacy issues or allegations that it was cherrypicked to fit an agenda.

The 2020 census streamlined its usual process by moving most of the formfilling from cumbersome paper surveys to the internet and equipping census workers with iPhones and census-taking apps instead of clipboards and paper forms.

Yet despite those improvements, the share of residents who opted to complete census forms remained stuck at two-thirds of all households, where it has sat stubbornly for four decades.