President Trump cannot make the coronavirus disappear by curtailing testing, despite his bizarre suggestions otherwise. But he can make Democrats disappear, politically speaking, by spoiling the decennial census — the all-important and heretofore nonpartisan tally of the U.S. population that determines which states get how much political representation and where billions in federal money flow. The Supreme Court blocked his first effort to skew the count. Now the White House is trying other means, even as Census Bureau officials struggle to complete a massive enumeration during a pandemic.
Recently, Mr. Trump issued an executive order declaring that only legal residents should count when census information is used to apportion House seats to the states. Though possibly illegal and potentially impossible, given the kind of data the census collects, the president’s dictum may nevertheless heighten concerns that Census Bureau enumerators seek information on immigrants, documented or undocumented, to harass them, which could lead to reduced participation in the count.
Now, NPR reports that the Census Bureau plans to roll back the date by which it concludes its on-the-ground counting, from Oct. 31 to Sept. 30. What was supposed to be a 10-week, door-to-door process involving half a million enumerators could be cut by several weeks, with statistical imputation used to make educated guesses about how many people live in hard-to-count areas. Experts warn that imputation has been used in the past to characterize perhaps 1 percent of the population, but a shortened census might require experts to guess at perhaps 10 or 15 percent of the population in some places.
