Filling out the 2020 census online is tight!
Barely an inconvenience!
Occured to me yesterday that the Census will hopefully provide employment to a small number of people out of work due to the coronavirus. If the Census weren’t so politicized, I’d be all for hiring as many people as possible to triple or quadruple check the data entry, just to make sure the count was right.
So if Trump weren’t such a scumbag, there would be no reason to suspect ulterior motives for this request. I mean nobody could suggest that throwing hundreds of thousands of people out in public going door to door asking questions is the right thing to do right now.
But damned if I’m not suspicious.
I guess the big question is: who is Trump going to ask? The Constitution is pretty clear about the requirements and timing for the Census. I don’t think Congress can pass a law directly contradicting it.
He will ask… the darkness.
So far the biggest impact I can think of resulting from that delay would be that the 2021 Virginia statewide elections would be conducted under the court-mandated new districts and not any new potential redistricting plan that the commonwealth drew up and approved themselves.
Which…that’s the map that helped Democrats seize both chambers of the assembly.
Sorry Donald, but the Constitution cannot be countermanded by an Executive Order, and mandates all people be counted, regardless of citizenship - see the 3/5th clause:
This seems unlikely to hold up in court.
It doesn’t matter. The mixed messaging will be enough.
For what?
For the count to be inaccurate.
I guess I don’t understand how a perceived “mixed message” from the one thing causes the other thing, an inaccurate count.
I’m not saying that I don’t think counts are accurate. Even the Census Bureau refers to their numbers as estimates. I’m just not necessarily seeing how an unconstitutional executive order affects the accuracy of the counts/estimates.
The most powerful man in the world says, “Don’t count illegals,” Fox News parrots it 24/7, and you don’t think that will have some effect on the final numbers?
Whom does it have an effect on? People responding to the census? Hey, if you’re undocumented, this isn’t going to make a whit of difference in a country that throws asylum-seeking children in cages. If you had great suspicions that the Census Bureau would share any info about you to ICE, you’ve had that suspicion long before yesterday.
Does it affect the census takers? They don’t know who is going to respond at the doors they knock, necessarily. They’re simply going to be counting people at addresses that didn’t respond on the internet or by mail to census mailings in February/March.
And to be clear: if the unconstitutional executive order is as described anyway, it says to not include undocumenteds – not avoid counting them.
And this is a question that is likely to be resolved in courts before the manual census count ends at the end of October.
/door opens
non-white
Census taker walks away
I heard on Fox that that’s a big problem, except the census takers walk away when they are white!
I wonder if conservatives have considered the consequences of not counting non-whites in the census? What it would mean for reapportionment of house seats and electoral votes? Sure, California is going to lose some seats, but so are Texas, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Florida, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Alabama, etc. I haven’t done the math myself, but I’m not at all sure it adds up to a winning red majority.
Scott, it sounds like you think this new ruling is a political move, as opposed to just the decent human thing to do.
Yes. But if they were going to do that, they were going to do that anyway though, with or without an unconstitutional executive decree.
And if you don’t think that such behaviors would hit the media full force fairly quickly, well…
Also worth pointing out: we have GREAT ways of very accurately measuring populations of uncountable groups in the US, based on footprint and consumption. (Pew Research is one of the public data research groups who’ve done magnificent work with such residual counting methods.)
The results of the 2020 census are typically reported to the US president in December/January. Because of the pandemic pushing the physical counting period back from March until August, the results of the US census will not be reported to the US president until April of 2021.
If there are clear and obvious undercounts based on population estimates, you may bet your collective bippys that audits and recounts would likely be ordered by a Democratic White House administration at that time.
All they need do is smile, nod and look like they writing things down/touching the pad.
I cant see how referring to rule of law, working institutions or ignoring the fact that perhaps 50% of the census takers are lunatic qanon death cultist supremacist fascists is relevant in 2020.