AP Interview: Census director seeks to restore confidence in count

Indifference. Distrust of the government. Budget uncertainties.

The next US census isn’t until 2030, but Census Bureau leaders are already looking for ways to adapt to a hectic civic climate that only seems to get more contentious. So this week they are issuing a call for public recommendations to make sure everyone is counted in the next once-a-decade US headcount that determines political power and federal funding.

Director of the Census Bureau Roberto Santos he said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press that the statistics agency plans to start its outreach efforts with hard-to-reach communities earlier, rather than just before the count, and may start knocking on doors earlier than in the past. Santos also addressed a backlash against a controversial method of confidentiality in the wide-ranging interview.

“We seek to restore confidence on an ongoing basis, not just a couple of years before a decennial census,” Santos said.

The call for public recommendations in a Federal Register notice came as the Census Bureau on Tuesday released more metrics on how well it did in the 2020 count, which was challenged by political interference of the Trump administration, the coronavirus pandemic and natural disasters.

Census data is used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. It is also used to redraw political districts and help determine the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funds each year.

A report card issued in May He showed that in the 2020 Census the black population was undercounted by 3.3%, those who identified as some other race were undercounted by 4.3%, nearly 5% of the Hispanic population was overlooked and more than 5.6% of American Indians living on reservations were undercounted. Asian and non-Hispanic white populations were overcounted by 1.6% and 2.6%, respectively.

Metrics released Tuesday showed the house count in the 2020 census it was fairly accurate: a statistically insignificant overcount of 0.04%. Small apartment buildings were overcounted, while mobile homes were undercounted. Households headed by Black, Asian, Native Hawaiian residents, as well as heads of households who classify themselves as some other race, were also overcounted.

The discrepancy between overcounts in households and undercounts of people among minority groups may be because the count of households is based on a list of addresses, while the count of people is based on their responses, according to the Census Bureau. .

“We still have to do the analyzes to see how the housing units can be counted more and the population less,” Santos said.

Tuesday’s report card also showed that residents of Puerto Rico were overcounted by 5.7%, which was not statistically different from the 2010 census. Santos said these assessments of the quality of the 2020 count cannot “find out ‘why this happened’; all we can do is estimate what happened.”

Santos also addressed the reaction of some researchers during a new method of confidentiality the Census Bureau implemented for the first time with data from the 2020 census.

Last week, demographers and other researchers began collecting signatures for a letter they plan to present to Santos calling for the Census Bureau to drop differential privacy for the 2030 census, as well as other Census Bureau data products like the Survey. about the American community. the poll provides the most comprehensive data on how people live in the US by asking questions about travel times, Internet access, family life, income, education levels, disabilities, military service, and job.

Differential privacy algorithms add intentional errors to the data to hide the identity of any given participant. It is more noticeable in smaller geographies, such as census blocks. The Census Bureau says they are necessary because without them, the growth of easily accessible third-party data combined with modern computing could allow hackers to reconstruct the identities of participants in their censuses and surveys in violation of the law. . Previous protection methods are no longer effective, according to the statistical agency.

Santos said he was not prepared at this point to say that differential privacy will be used for the 2030 census, as “there may be new revelations in terms of new techniques available.” to implement differential privacy algorithms on American Community Survey data, a change not expected before 2025.

“Anything is possible over the course of the next few years because of the way technologies and algorithms are advancing,” Santos said.

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Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

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