NCLM Volume 70, Issue 4, 2020

SOUTHERN CITY QUARTER 4 2020 28 BEN BROWN NCLM Communications & Multimedia Strategist Census 2020: What Now? Barring wildcard changes, the 2020 Census counting is done, and has been since mid-October. At the time of this writing, there was some question as to wheth- er the deliverables—the new state-by-state population tallies to be reported to the president—would be accurate and ready by the statutory end-of-year deadline. But there’s no question that the 2020 Census was, for better or worse, the most standout operation of its kind in living memory. Court actions, shifting target dates, and various sources’ mixed messages about the headcount’s use, to whom it applied and how factors like COVID-19 might impact it, really threw out any chance of a straightforward population sweep. And that has piqued curiosities about how the Census will be evaluated, and where it’s going. “For about two or three months there, the Census Bureau (per the pandemic) shut down their field operations,” recalled Bob Coats, the Census liaison to Gov. Roy Cooper. In North Carolina, Coats said, the non-response followup piece of the Census field work, where census takers go door to door, didn’t start until mid-August, when 1.6 million houses hadn’t yet been counted— a high workload. Still, the Census Bureau by Oct. 19 was reporting 99 percent completion nationally, with North Carolina in that apparently healthy range. The Bureau also said the national 67 percent self-response rate beat that of 2010. “America stepped up and answered the call: shape your future by re- sponding to the 2020 Census,” said Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham. “Generally, better data comes from self-response, but after a decade of global decline in census and survey participation along with the challenges presented to communities by COVID-19, we had not expected to exceed the 2010 self-response rate.” So what about that 99 percent completion rate? It sounds pretty good. But at present there’s a bit of mystery in it, and some concern. North Carolina’s self-response rate was a little higher than 63 percent, while the Census Bureau said it counted 99.9 percent of the state’s households. What’s unknown, Coats said, is how complete the job was in terms of actually counting household members, versus using administrative data and imputation or inferences for a sort of guess. “The concern has been that with the tightened time on collecting this information, the census worker didn’t have the time to be as thorough as possible, as they have been in the past in going door- to-door… They might be using (data guesses and imputation) at LAWSUITS, EXTENSIONS, PANDEMICS, AND UNCERTAINTY DEFINED A 2020 CENSUS THAT MAY STILL HAVE SOME STORYLINES TO WRITE YET. Photo Credit: U.S. Census Bureau.