Supreme Court allows Census to end early. Here’s why that is concerning to some
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the 2020 Census count to cease earlier than scheduled — leaving some concerned about the implications of the ruling.
It’s the latest move in a legal battle that’s shifted the U.S. Census Bureau’s data-collection deadline several times — eventually landing on Oct. 31 — as the process has been met with uncertainty during the coronavirus pandemic.
The high court’s ruling comes after a request from President Donald Trump’s administration to suspend a lower court’s order that data collection continue through the end of October, the Associated Press reports. The Census Bureau is required by Congress to turn in its data by Dec. 31, and the administration argued that data collection would need to end immediately to meet that deadline.
A group of local government and civil rights groups sued, arguing the push to end the count early would lead to an undercount, per the AP.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, overturned the lower court’s order — a win for the Trump administration.
What the ruling means
The Census Bureau said in a statement shortly after the ruling that it will end “self-response and field data collection operations” on Thursday.
The court’s unsigned order only paused the agency’s data collection, but The New York Times reports it essentially nixed it as the process “cannot be easily restarted” and as the deadline nears.
Self response to the Census is available until 6 a.m. EDT Friday and paper responses must be postmarked by Oct. 15, the agency says. Census workers will end in-person follow ups after Thursday.
About 99.9% of “housing units” have been accounted for as of Tuesday, the agency said.
The Census count, done every 10 years, determines how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives and how federal funds are distributed to communities.
An early end to data collection will likely give Trump and Republicans a say in determining each states’ representation in the House, ABC News reports.
Concerns about the ruling
Some have expressed concern about the ruling yielding an inaccurate population count, which could do harm to many communities.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a dissent, writing “harms caused by rushing this year’s census count are irreparable” and that “respondents will suffer their lasting impact for at least the next 10 years.”
She wrote that the percentage of non-responses to the Census are “likely much higher among marginalized populations and in hard-to-count areas, such as rural and tribal lands.”
“When governments allocate resources using census data, those populations will disproportionately bear the burden of any inaccuracies,” Sotomayor wrote.
Stephen Roe Lewis — governor of the Gila River Indian Community, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit — said in a statement to NPR that the ruling is “a bitter pill for us to swallow.”
“With no explanation or rationale, a majority simply decided that our people do not deserve to be counted, thus continuing a long history of leaving Indian peoples at the margins of the U.S. society at large and economy,” Lewis wrote, according to NPR.
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, released a statement Tuesday outlining worries that the decision will “result in irreversible damage to the 2020 Census.”
“As we explore options, we will continue to push undercounted communities in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi to participate while the counting process remains open and active,” the statement says. “This fight is about ensuring that our nation’s hard-to-count populations, including Black people, communities of color, immigrants and other vulnerable populations were captured in the count.”
Clarke said the order’s “silver lining” is that millions more Americans were counted than would have been if earlier deadlines had been implemented.
“As we have fought the Trump administration in the courts, we have helped to secure more time on the clock to achieve a fair and accurate count,” the statement says.
