How The 2020 Census Could Doom American Democracy

This is a bad thing for a census.

The census, believe it or not, isn't just some tedious government box-ticking exercise. It's incredibly important in deciding how federal funds are distributed among states for things like welfare programs, healthcare, schools, public housing, and infrastructure. Ironically, Congress has been underfunding the Census Bureau itself for the last several years, which has impacted efforts to test and roll out plans for the 2020 census. In 2018, Congress finally gave them a decent budget ... but only enough to provide the "minimum resources needed to prepare for its constitutional mandate." In other words, enough money to do the absolute minimum to ensure that the founding fathers don't rise from their graves and beat Wilbur Ross' ass.

It's all sounding pretty grim so far, but good news! There's an online system that's going to solve all of these problems!

And maybe you've noticed, but people are a little concerned about what's happening with their data these days. This new system might encourage people who were previously too busy or lazy to respond, but there's no guarantee that gain wouldn't be mitigated by people worried that their data might end up with Cambridge Analytica 2.0, Russia, or Donald Trump -- or to put it another way, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, or Donald Trump.

An online system also disenfranchises low-income/immigrant populations, who out of all demographics are less likely to have reliable internet access. A recent survey, for instance, found that only 62 percent of households earning $25,000+ per year have internet access (compared to 86 percent for households earning $100,000+ per year). Another survey found that, of the low-income households who only access the internet via smartphone, 24 percent have had their service cut for not paying their bills. The census response rate has always been low among immigrant populations anyway, because of their fear that the government will use census information to hunt them down and throw them in the back of a van. And this sentiment existed in 2010, before those fears would become even more well-founded.

There are currently countless lawsuits in the works -- filed by states, cities, groups, and individuals -- that aim to have this question removed from the 2020 census. And we better hope they succeed, or else volunteers administering the in-person census aren't going to find those people -- or if they do, they're not going to get a response when they ring the doorbell. In situations like that, the census board has to rely on its last resort, local and state records ... which won't contain reliable information about people who've just arrived (that's the "immigrant" part of the word).

Of course, we're treating these things as bugs in the system ... but what if they're really features?

This isn't some crazy conspiracy theory. Several hardline anti-immigration politicians like Kris Kobach have declared that they want to use census data to redraw legislative maps based on the number of people living in a district, rather than total population, which reduces the political power of areas with a high level of non-response.

We should also mention that there are ways to deal with census under-counts ... but when the census bureau announced that they would try it with regard to minority respondents of the 1990 census, they were sued by the RNC on the grounds that this endangered "our GOP majority in the House of Representatives as well as partisan control of state legislatures nationwide." The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the RNC by a 5-4 majority, because everything is terrible and always has been.

Notice we didn't say "always will be." We've got two years left to decide that part.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing history that you should definitely subscribe to.

Man, this is so much more complicated than people just going door to door with an abacus.

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