With 99.9% of Vermonters counted in the 2020 Census, federal data puts the state in a tie for highest Census response.
But as the actual end date of the Census remains up in the air, the head of the Vermont Complete Count Commission has mixed feelings about the meaning of the close-to-final tally.
“People might look at it and say, ‘Why would you be unhappy? You still got it done,’” said Jason Broughton, who is also the state librarian. “But we have had to do it in three months.”
The compressed timeframe for Census workers, who started their rollout in July due to Covid concerns, could lead to accuracy issues, Broughton said. The door-to-door workers would typically do far more cross-checking and validation before the end of the count.
It’s not clear how much time is left. The Census Bureau announced an end to the count on Sept. 30, but a federal judge ruled that date had to be pushed back to Oct. 31.
But the bureau then announced it planned to end all operations on Oct. 5. It’s not clear how that will fit into the legal challenge, Broughton said.
Until the Census finally closes down, any stragglers can still fill out their forms online at 2020census.gov. Vermont’s first mostly online Census in 2010 had a close, but slightly lower self-response rate: 60.1% now versus 60.3% then.
The gap in responses is filled by Census door knockers, who check on addresses registered in their system where people haven’t completed the form. Many of those people include hard-to-count populations, such as immigrants, older Vermonters and people without internet access.
Broughton said Census outreach has involved major hurdles and small victories in the face of Covid. Many institutions that host group populations, such as university students, became preoccupied with their own Covid struggles.
“We were helping them navigate the situation they were in,” he said. “It’s understandable they were thinking about, ‘How are we going to reopen the school in the fall?’”
But the state’s decision to place people who were homeless in hotels and other facilities made counting that population a little easier, he said. “It allowed the Census workers to go to those locations, rather than go several through tracts of land,” he said.
Local organizations have still managed to host mobile outreach stations where Vermonters can ask questions or get help filling out the Census. The bureau promoted the online form with advertisements on radio, on receipts, and on the walls of gas stations.
“I ordered food from Magic Wok (in Middlebury) and took it back to the house, and when my friends opened up their fortune cookies, on one side was the fortune and on the other was ‘be counted, fill out your 2020 Census,’” Broughton said.
Despite the challenges, Broughton believes the crisis shows more than ever how important the Census is.
“All that federal funding — from the CARES Act, from bills — is appropriated to us based on numbers from 2010,” he said, referring to the 2010 Census.
After the Census ends, the next steps will be to pass the numbers to the White House and Congress, then to states, which can use the data to redraw their election districts so they’re in line with the one-person, one-vote standard, and analyze trends in the population.
Broughton said he’s concerned about changes in how that data would be published. That change, called “differential privacy,” would slightly alter the total numbers presented to the public to protect people’s privacy. The algorithm would be true to the total population of the state, but might change the number of, for example, Black people living in Barre, Broughton said.
Broughton said that might make it hard for the public to understand what the Census data means.
“There are questions that the Census Bureau has to address,” he said.
