Census director turns to states for help with next count

DENVER — The next effort to count America’s population will rely substantially on data sets generated outside of the U.S. Census Bureau, as the nation’s chief demographic agency seeks new ways to find and count those who have historically been the most difficult to reach.

In an interview, Census Bureau Director Robert Santos told Pluribus News his scientists will look to other federal agencies and to state agencies for existing data that can help the Bureau create as complete a view as possible of the size, shape and location of the American public.

“We are ingesting increasing amounts of really good, high-quality data from different federal agencies. And we’re doing our due diligence to see what’s out there among states and among the commercial sector,” Santos said. “You don’t have to rely on this massive mailing out to everybody. You can hone in and rely more on the administrative data for those that are historically easy to count.”

By reducing the amount of time the Bureau spends counting those who are easiest to count — the way a political campaign stops targeting a voter who has already returned an absentee ballot in the days before an election — enumerators would have more resources to focus on communities who have traditionally been more difficult to count.

“The one thing that’s been true for the last half century is that the historically difficult, the hardest to reach communities and populations have been continually the hardest to count,” he said.

Santos said the way to solve the problem “is through our engagement activities, through our rethinking activities internally, and through this technological and methodological reinvention of a decennial census that relies more on administrative records for” those who are easiest to count — and then using the savings from that on those who are harder to reach.

The 2020 U.S. Census did not fully count the number of Blacks, Latinos, American Indians and Alaska Natives, according to a followup survey the bureau released earlier this year. The survey found the Census undercounted the Black population by 3.3% and the Latino population by 5% — both margins that were larger than the undercount registered a decade prior.

At the same time, the Census overcounted the non-Hispanic White population by a margin almost twice as large as the previous survey.

The decennial survey significantly undercounted residents in six states — Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. It overcounted residents of Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Utah, the Bureau said in May.

The number of states over- and undercounted in 2020 was higher than states in the same category in 2010, but significantly lower than miscounts that took place in the 2000 Census. Santos, who assumed office as the Census Bureau’s director in 2022, called the miscounts “a larger wobble in an otherwise relatively strong enumeration.”

“From the perspective of conducting a decennial census, in a COVID environment, I was proud of the job that we did,” Santos said.

Many states invested millions of dollars in so-called “complete count” campaigns, aimed at bolstering the share of residents who participated in the Census. In California alone, the state allocated $187 million on a broad effort to boost participation.

But those campaigns were upended by the pandemic, which locked the nation down just weeks before the formal Census Day on April 1, 2020. Santos credited complete count campaigns that had “to completely reinvent themselves.”

“They could no longer have the table with the grocery store, because of contact. Nobody knew what the nature of the beast was. Remember, this was all before a vaccine was available,” he said. “I think it was really critical that we had expanded the number of partners and that we leveraged those. And to the extent that we were able to get complete counts, or approach them, was really because of the great work of our partners in the complete count committees.”

Preparing for the census takes years of work. Santos said his agency is planning to maintain and build the connections forged ahead of 2020 in advance of the next count.

“The only way to do a decennial census in this day and age is in tandem and in partnership with the community,” he said. “Part of the lessons learned that came out of this is that we can no longer be episodic with our outreach. We can’t wait until a couple of years before the decennial census and say, ‘Hey, guys, it’s time to help us.’ Instead, the whole nature of what a partnership is should be reinvented.”

The last census showed a more diverse American population than has ever been registered in prior surveys. Santos, the first member of an ethnic minority to win Senate confirmation to run the Census Bureau, took heart in the data.

“The really meaningful and relevant stuff to me is the notion that our population is becoming increasingly diverse. There’s more mixed-race families, there’s more mixed-ethnicity families, and more mixed races. And to me, that’s an absolutely beautiful thing,” he said.

“Pretty soon we’re going to be a majority-minority population in the U.S., in a matter of decades. I think it’s happening more quickly than people expected because of our acculturation in society, that there’s more interracial and mixed ethnic, racial marriages.”