To state the obvious, there’s never a good time for a pandemic. But among the things that make this a particularly bad time is that the United States is in the middle not only of a presidential election, but of the decennial census.
Notices have already been sent out to households across the nation about how to complete census forms online, but the Census Bureau has wisely suspended its outreach workers’ trips into neighborhoods to implore people to participate and to drop off notices at homes that don’t receive regular mail delivery. With much of the nation now living in near-isolation and COVID-19 spreading at stunning levels, this is no time for the government to risk exposing an army of door-knockers to the virus or, worse still, inadvertently spreading it door-to-door.
The problem with pausing the census process, though, is that doing so could affect the population count. Wednesday marks the official census day, but that’s not the day the census forms are due (the count continues for several months). Instead, that’s the date anchoring the central questions of the census: where are Americans living on April 1 and who lives there with them?
About a third of the nation’s households have already responded online, but much of the process has been interrupted. In addition to putting outreach efforts on hold, the government has also delayed its calendar for counting people in group housing, interviewing people at homes that did not respond to the initial mailing, and undertaking a count of the homeless. Still, the government says it is confident it will meet its congressionally mandated Dec. 31 deadline to report the basic count of who lives where.
There has been some discussion of whether the government should delay the census altogether in the face of COVID-19, but it doesn’t have much flexibility beyond tinkering minimally with its calendar. The U.S. Constitution mandates a census every 10 years to provide the population statistics for reapportioning seats in the House of Representatives. But the Constitution left it up to Congress to handle the details, which it has done with occasional updates since just after the birth of the nation.