It's Not Just The Mail; The Census Seems To Be Getting Buried Too

While we're fighting a war to save the post office, there's another American institution that's getting beat down in tandem like we're witnessing the most abusive choreography in a synchronized dance competition. I'm speaking, of course, about the United States Census -- that annoying survey you may or may not have taken by phone, mail, or in person, which tracks our national population total. This gets tricky to collect in a pandemic as, according to The New York Times, more than one in three people hired as census takers have quit or failed to show up for fear of getting sick.

But, like clockwork, Donald Trump has shown up to take a bad situation and make it notably worse. The President has moved the initial deadline for the Census up by a month, despite the Census Bureau telling congress they needed to push their deadlines back to April 2021 due to COVID-19. So now the Census workers are essentially in a video game speedrun, except the game is, "Count the non-mask-wearing dildos and dodge the COVID particles they spit at you." Kenneth Prewitt, the Columbia University professor who oversaw the 2000 census, says, "If the current situation holds, I do not expect a census of the quality that the Census Bureau will even want to release the data."

Of course, President Trump isn't doing this in a vacuum, not least of which because he's never operated a vacuum in his entire life. The Census data is used to allocate trillions of dollars in federal grants and aid and is also used to divide the number of seats in the House of Representatives. According to The Economist, "researchers are afraid that the Census Bureau may not be able to count enough people, or a fully representative set of Americans {and} the agency could end up undercounting minority voters which would bias the government against them for at least the next ten years."

Not only is this administration apparently trying to suppress the vote, but it also appears to be trying to repress the number of people that it considers to exist. It sure is a convenient thing for the people in power to be able to manipulate. "What do you mean North Carolina needs more disaster relief? I only count ten people living here." The only question now is which American institution will be taken advantage of next?

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