Evansville, nation have a lot at stake in ongoing 2020 census drama

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — The claim seems preposterous, and some argue it is.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported last week that "99.98% of all housing units and addresses nationwide" were accounted for in the 2020 census, with 67% self-responding online, by mail or by phone, and the rest accounted for by census takers in the field.

The Census Bureau offers those numbers by state, and they do include Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois — but not by county. The bureau did publish a map showing how well regional offices did in the field reaching households that hadn't self-responded. Enumerators for the Evansville Area Census Office, which covers most of Southern Indiana, made contact with 99.9% of the households in a master list of addresses identified by canvassers last year.

But John H. Thompson, U.S. Census Bureau director from 2013 to 2017, said some of the households that didn't self-respond were enumerated by, well, by guessing.

"It’s not how many houses you make contact with, or addresses – it’s the quality of what you get for the address," said Oregon-based Thompson.

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"You don’t know how good (the quality) was until you look at things like, ‘Well, how many of them did (census takers) only get what they call a ‘pop count’ only for? Which means, when they go to this close-out procedure, they will let an enumerator accept just a count of people from a proxy."

A proxy? A neighbor or a landlord, Thompson said.

"They’re supposed to try to find some knowledgeable person," he said.

In a Wednesday news conference, Census Bureau officials defended the 2020 field operation.

“Now that data collection is finished, we have a very strong sense that all of the early performance metrics we’ve shared indicate that a very good census, if not an accurate census, was conducted during an unbelievably trying time for our nation,” said Tim Olson, associate director for field operations.

Bureau officials cited the COVID-19 pandemic, Gulf Coast hurricanes and nationwide social unrest among the challenges the field operation faced.

“This has been the greatest challenge that all of us who manage the census have ever encountered in our lives,” Olson said.

What's in it for local residents?

None of this means much to Kelley Coures, Evansville metropolitan development director and the city's point man for the census.

Coures wants to make sure Evansville gets its share of the money at stake.

The census determines each state's share of seats in Congress, Electoral College votes, federal tax dollars for Medicare, Medicaid and other public services and all kinds of other federal money. Money for roads and highways, water and sewer lines, broadband and other services. Property tax money from companies who might relocate to Evansville, but who want to look at the census figures first. There's a lot.

"I always hope that we'll get an increase in our federal funding for housing," Coures said. "There are years when it goes up; there are years when it goes down."

Coures singled out the city's housing assistance and assistance for addressing homelessness, its Emergency Solution Grant and Home Investment Partnership funding from HUD. The city got nearly $700,000 in Home Investment Partnership money and about $250,000 from the Emergency Solution Grant program, Coures said.

"Who knows, if we had an accurate count and a complete count and an increase in the percentage of low-to-moderate income people out of the census, then that might signal an increase in funding," the DMD agency head said. "I've always got my fingers crossed that we'll get more, so we can do more.

"If I had a wish list and the magic lamp with the genie in it, those would be the two things that I would be hopeful for."

Coures does take pride in Vanderburgh County's self-response numbers. Last year, he worked for weeks to convene a roughly 40-member "Complete Count Committee" of community and religious leaders to work at the ground level to persuade people to participate in the census.

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According to Census Bureau data, Vanderburgh County registered a 70.7% self-response rate. The city of Evansville's number was 66.8%. Nationally, the number was 67%.

"The county's self-response was higher than the country," Coures said.

The census got to this point starting and stopping along the way

The census has been carried out while the nation is roiling in a stew of coronavirus, racial unrest and political polarization. So nothing about it was ever going to be easy.

There was, for starters, a months-long legal battle over the end date for the decennial count.

The Census Bureau had planned to end the counting phase on Oct. 31 after the COVID-19 pandemic all but shut down many census operations last spring. The bureau said it would move back the dates for delivering population figures used by Congress and states for reapportionment and redistricting to April 2021 and beyond.

But the U.S. Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, made the controversial decision in August to move up the deadline to Sept. 30. The extra time was needed, the Commerce Department said, to deliver preliminary population totals to President Donald Trump by the statutory deadline of Dec. 31.

In the storm of litigation that followed, cities, counties and civil rights groups alleged the Sept. 30 end date was meant to accommodate Trump's July memorandum seeking to bar people in the U.S. illegally from being included in the headcount as congressional districts are redrawn.

The 2020 census may have relied heavily on self-response, these critics said, but census takers were still needed in the field to reach minority communities, college students on campuses, senior citizens in assisted living facilities and homeless individuals.

But Trump said including people here illegally in the count “would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government.” Opponents said counting everyone living in the country means counting literally everyone. They said Trump had no authority to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the census.

Courts restored the Oct. 31 deadline. But that wasn't the end.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted a request by Trump's administration to end field operations in the census count on Oct. 15 while an appeal is heard over a lower court's order that it continue until Oct. 31. 

The Trump administration had argued the Oct. 31 deadline would have left insufficient time for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to make the Dec. 31 deadline. Noting that the count had been delayed by COVID-19, the administration argued that if the time spent counting was reduced, the deadline could still be met.

In their Wednesday news conference, Census Bureau officials said they can make the Dec. 31 data-processing deadline by processing the apportionment numbers first and dealing later with numbers used for drawing legislative districts. They said Census Bureau employees will work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And they said the bureau uses computers that work faster than ever before.

The census has political implications — big ones

Trump's critics have said the previous April 2021 deadline would have allowed the winner of the Nov. 3 presidential election to relay the population totals then. The Dec. 31 deadline would guarantee that Republican Trump controlled the process even if he loses the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

The critics said that would allow the Commerce Department to implement Trump's order to exclude people in the country illegally from the apportionment count.

"There's a lot of concern among stakeholders that the census was rushed, that there are going to be undercounts of the traditionally hard-to-count populations and overcounts for the white, non-Hispanic population," Thompson said.

The impact is potentially enormous.

Thompson estimated the Census Bureau's overall field operation targeted some 50 million housing units where no one had self-responded to the census. Perhaps 10 million of those were unoccupied, he said.

That leaves 40 million occupied housing units.

“But suppose that all (the census takers) had gotten was just one person per housing unit because they had to rush everything," Thompson said. "Then they would have missed 40 million people – which they didn’t do, but it just shows you."

There are more possible political implications to all this.

The hard-to-count populations — minorities, the economically disadvantaged and young people who move more frequently than other age groups and are thus harder to track down — live predominantly in urban areas. They are traditional Democratic, not Republican, constituencies.

Looking ahead, Thompson says the 2020 census may have still more challenges to deal with. Potential duplicate enumerations, computer errors in enumeration records.

"What would they do if they say, 'Oh my goodness, we had a mistake in a computer code' — and it affected apportionment," he said.

That would be important. Apportionment means determining the proportional number of members each state sends to the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives, based on population. The House is the lower body of Congress.

Civil rights groups and local governments are still nursing hope the Dec. 31 apportionment data-processing deadline can be extended through existing lawsuits or by Congress.

"And then there's, of course, the lawsuits over (Trump's) presidential memorandum to exclude undocumented people from the apportionment count," Thompson said.

Stay tuned.