Judge Koh’s order offered some breathing room for a Census Bureau that has been struggling to manage what was supposed to be the most accurate population count ever, conducted largely over
Instead, this year’s census has been a star-crossed exercise, pushed far behind schedule by the coronavirus pandemic, stymied by clumsy software and so mired in Republican political strategizing that even former directors of the Census Bureau have called the entire count into question.
Even this week, the government’s sole witness in the lawsuit, Albert E. Fontenot Jr., the associate director for decennial census programs, said in a deposition that the pandemic, western wildfires and major storms in the South posed “significant risks to complete all states by September 30.”
Despite those hurdles, the Census Bureau says it has finished counting more than 96 percent of the nation’s households, theoretically placing it in reach of its stated goal of 99 percent by the end of the month. But whether that can be done — or done accurately — remains in great doubt.
Nationwide, the completion rate varies widely, with four states above the 99 percent goal. Six states remain below 90 percent and are considered poor candidates to be completed by month’s end.
Beyond that, the reported completion rates are an unreliable barometer of the census’s accuracy because a household can be deemed counted in many ways, with wildly varying precision. The rates do not show the share of households that have been counted by highly reliable methods like internet or in-person interviews, versus by dicier means like asking a neighbor or relying on personal information from a database.
On Monday, the inspector general of the Commerce Department said the compressed schedule threatened the reliability of both the head count and the data processing and error checks that follow it.