Supreme Court Census Decision Leaves Communities Uncounted

Once every decade, the U.S. is bombarded by the pleasantly passive marketing of the census. Ad campaigns gently inform residents of the census’s significance, matter-of-factly highlighting voter representation and the values of civic duty. The 2020 census, however, has joined the ranks of other once-unshakeable institutions now eyed by the public with uncertainty.

On October 13, the U.S. Supreme Court quietly stopped the census with a decision on Ross v. National Urban League. In the form of an unsigned order, the Justices upheld a lower court’s decision to shut down extensions of the national count.

“(M)eeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissenting opinion. Though one or two other Justices may have also opposed the decision, Sotomayor was the Court’s only published dissent.

The Court’s order stopped the census on Friday, October 16, with field operations concluding the day before.

The Census Bureau depends largely on door-to-door counters to gather an accurate tally of the country’s population. That part of the data-gathering process was gearing up in the spring, just as COVID-19 began rearing its head in the U.S.

The immediate aftermath was severe for the census. It hit in the form of the widespread shutdowns and versions of “shelter-in-place” orders that kept pretty much everyone—including both census workers and the people they were meant to count—inaccessible.

Officials quickly recognized the imminent consequences their work would suffer on account of the pandemic. They were certain by early spring that adhering to the existing census timeline would be impossible. Accordingly, the Commerce Department (which oversees the Census Bureau) extended the reporting deadline beyond its original July 31 cutoff.

Before the Ross decision, officials applied multiple extensions to preserve the census’s sacrosanct quest for accuracy. The October 31 deadline was the most recent, with talks of additional delays already in the works. Lower courts were, for the most part, in agreement with the postponements. After all, there have been delayed census instances in the past, and delay seems to be in accord with the value of accuracy over deadlines.

However, the extensions were abruptly contested and rejected. President Donald Trump and his

administration reported that 99.9 percent of households in 49 states had been counted; they maintain that this is ample precision for the census. Critics of the decision point to the disingenuous nature of that 99.9 percentage, which fails to remark on the uncounted regions and cities. Justice Sotomayor called the statistic an attempt to downplay the risk to disproportionately omitted populations.

“(E)ven a fraction of a percent of the Nation’s 140 million households amounts to hundreds of thousands of people left uncounted,” she said. “And significantly, the percentage of nonresponses is likely much higher among marginalized populations and in hard-to-count areas.”

She cited officials in the department who balked at the “ludicrous” expectations and insisted on the merit of the extensions. Studies have long proven that shortchanging the 2020 Census will directly lead to underrepresentation of already minimized concentrations of the population, such as low-income neighborhoods and BIPOC communities.

“This Court normally does not grant extraordinary relief on such a painfully disproportionate balance of harms,” Sotomayor wrote. Ten years ago, she mentioned, the 2010 census reached the same 99 percent landmark yet continued with its counting measures for another month.

In the past few months, the White House shifted considerably on its position regarding the census. Initially, the extensions held an obvious, bipartisan necessity, garnering support from Republican officials. But by halting the count early, the Trump administration said they could meet the Congress-set deadline for “apportionment,” the process of allocating congressional seats for states’ representation.

Trump is also engaged in a corresponding legal battle in which he seeks to omit noncitizens from the 2020 census. The U.S. Constitution expressly states that the census should be “a statement showing the whole number of persons in each State,” traditionally understood to include noncitizens as well as citizens.

If Mr. Trump is successful, it will be the first U.S. census in history to exclude people based on immigration status. Over the summer, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s proposed census question, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” Since the 2020 census did not include immigration status to hypothetically determine omissions of unauthorized residents, the data would have to come from the White House’s own means. But, despite the temporary injunction, Trump’s administration is permitted to “(continue) to study whether and how it would be feasible to calculate" the numbers of noncitizens.

The “citizenship question” case will be brought before the Supreme Court on November 30. It was previously set for next April but was permitted an expedited review. With the accelerated timeline, Trump could apply his measures to the census even if he is voted out of office. This would give him a strong hand in assigning House seats despite the acknowledged inadequacy of the existing calculations.

Regardless, the fate of the 2020 census is already sure to leave a disproportionate and enduring footprint on the country. For the next decade, federal funding and congressional representation will knowingly operate based on an incomplete count.