To date, just under 63 percent of American households have responded to the census. In normal years, census workers would knock on as many doors as possible from the other 37 percent of homes, many in poorer and rural areas of the country. The arrival of the pandemic, only weeks before the start of the count on April 1, disrupted those plans. Census officials were hoping that the virus would fade by now, allowing for more in-person data collection. But the outbreak hasn’t abated, and could get even worse this fall when the traditional flu season begins. Add to that the many Americans who have been displaced by the virus, either temporarily or permanently, and you have the ingredients for a major distortion in the count.
The president ought to do everything in his power to ameliorate that distortion. Instead, Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have repeatedly tried to exacerbate it. By their calculations, the fewer people of color and noncitizens who are counted, the better.
It’s true that people of color, who are more likely to be poor or marginalized than white people, are less likely to be counted in the census, perhaps more so this year than in decades. But the irony is that a rush to finish the counting process could hurt Mr. Trump’s own voters, too. That’s because the poorest states, which depend the most on federal funding, also tend to have lower census response rates. In West Virginia, federal funding from programs tied to the census accounted for 17 percent of economic activity in 2017, according to Mr. Reamer’s calculations. The state has one of the lowest census response rates.
And because so much federal funding is allocated to states based at least in part on census population estimates, an inaccurate census doesn’t just harm people in undercounted communities. It harms everyone who lives in the same state.
Whatever happens in the election, the effects of the census will be with the country for at least another decade — a legacy that will long outlive this administration.
Congress can intervene. The deadline for delivery of the final count needs to be extended to April 30, 2021, as the Census Bureau initially requested. That would force states to delay the process of drawing new legislative maps, and in some cases could make it impossible to meet deadlines written into state law. But the necessary adjustments are a small price to pay for 10 years of a fairer and more accurate democracy.
Four former census directors, from Democratic and Republican administrations, called in a statement this week for Congress to commission outside experts to establish criteria for evaluating the accuracy of the final count. That’s a good idea, too.