Can Americans trust the results of the 2020 Census? The first results of the 2020 Census were

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Can Americans trust the results of the 2020 Census?

The first results of the 2020 Census were released Monday, after encountering so many obstacles that some census experts privately joked that it was cursed.

Over the past four years, the decennial count was hit with funding shortages, partisan interference, legal battles and a pandemic that paralyzed it just as it was getting started, spawning new political and legal battles.

Now that the initial data a tally of each state's population that determines a decade's worth of congressional apportionment and electoral college votes has come out, and when more detailed data on race and geography is released this summer,they will be scrutinized bystatisticians, politicians and civil rights advocates, many of whom worry the setbacks could result in less accurate results than in previous decades. "We don't know how good the quality of the data is," said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a political consulting firm specializing in redistricting, election administration, and the analysis and presentation of census and political data. "It is an open question."

If the results are widely seen as flawed, itcould cloud a decade of political reshuffling, federal spending, city planning, academic research, and private and public enterprise that rely on census data.

The bureau also released a preliminary report onquality metricsMonday, in part to help allay concerns about problems the hurdles may have caused, said Michael Bentley, assistant division chief for Census Statistical Support in the bureau's Decennial Statistical Studies Division. "We are trying to be very transparent and we do feel good about what we did with the Census 2020 ultimately," he said on a call with reporters Wednesday. "The quality looks like it's very comparable to the 2010 Census, but we want everyone that's using the data to feel that way."

No census is perfect. The once-in-a-decade project of enumerating every person in every household in the country inevitably results in some being missed and some being counted more than once. But generally the results are considered to be accurate enough to use (a notable exception was in 1920, when they set off so much political strife that they were never used for apportionment).

To check the count's quality, census results are compared with other demographic data, including information from the Census Bureau's own annual American Community Survey and a post-census enumeration in which it returns to some areas to double-check its work.

Some of the state population figures released Monday were lower than projected, but the overall tally was higher than expected. In its preliminary report on quality metrics, Census Bureau demographers said, "Ultimately, our evaluations demonstrate that these first population counts from the 2020 Census are generally aligned with benchmark data," while emphasizing that their analysis should not be taken as the last word on "the accuracy or reasonableness of the 2020 Census results," and that further assessments "will be undertaken in future." Still, experts warned that that doesn't automatically mean the apportionment numbers are correct.

"People shouldn't draw a conclusion 'Oh, everything's accurate!' No, we won't know that andthat's probably not likely," said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House census oversight subcommittee. The reapportionment data "almost always masks significant over-counting and undercounting at the local and community level," she said.

That more granular information, which is used for redistricting and which includes race, ethnicity and gender and goes down to much smaller geographic areas, won't be released until late summer.

The 2020 count's troubles begansoon afterPresident Donald Trump took office. Administration officials almost immediatelybegan discussingadding a citizenship question to the census, and they officially announced it in 2018. Civil rights groups and experts inside and outside the Census Bureau warned that the question probably would depress the count in immigrant communities and lead to an inaccurate tally, and multiple lawsuits challenged it. The Supreme Court blocked it in 2019, though Trump ordered federal agencies to provide the bureau with citizenship information anyway.

Meanwhile, Congress did not fund the survey adequately, forcing the bureau to reduce its test runs from three locations to one and sparking a separate pairof lawsuits.

As 2020 opened, the bureaustruggled to hire2.7 million temporary workers in a boom time with historically low unemployment. Then in March, just as the first mailers were sent out inviting people to fill out the census form, thecoronavirushit.

Events designed to publicize the census and encourage participation were canceled. College students left campuses, sowing confusion as to whether they would be counted as residents at college or at their parents' homes. Plans to count homeless people had to be put off. Field offices closed and enumerators hired to go door-to-door from May through July were told to hold off.

In April 2020, the bureau announced a new schedule that extended the count and its delivery dates, and it asked Congress to approve a deadline extension for apportionment numbers, from Dec. 31, 2020, to April 30, 2021.

But over the summer, Trump issued a memo calling for undocumented immigrants to be excluded from being counted for apportionment. Such an action, which was unprecedented, probably would haveshifted powerto states with more Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites. More lawsuits ensued, calling such an exclusion unconstitutional, illegal and unworkable.

Within days, the government reversed itself on the April 30 deadline, saying the bureau would now stick to its original Dec. 31 date for delivering state population totals. The administration said it was doing so because Congress had never approved the later date. But keeping to the original deadline also ensured that Trump would still be in office to receive the apportionment data.

It also would mean compressing the count by a month and cutting in half the time for the post-count analysis conducted after every census. The date reversal generated additional lawsuits.

By fall, the census had become a race against the clock. The end date remained in flux as court rulings were issued and appealed.Wildfires and hurricanesraged through states that lagged farthest behind on the count, displacing residents and eating up crucial time.

Enumerators scrambled to finish counting the roughly one-third of households that had not self-responded. Many described being told to bend rules, compress in-person visits and hazard guesses as to the inhabitants of households in order to reach the bureau's goal of a 99 percent count.

In mid-October, the Supreme Courtruledthat the count could end, two weeks earlier than the bureau had planned. By then it was unclear how many rules had been broken.

After the bureau's post-count analysis revealed anomalies in the data, it became clear the Dec. 31 deadline was untenable. Still, the administration pressed the bureau to produce the apportionment data before Trump left office, and political appointees in the bureau reportedly pushed career employees to speed up the process and produce a tally of undocumented immigrants in each state, though no such tally exists.

In the end, it couldn't be done. On President Biden's first day in office he issued an executive order that ended the attempt.

But the disruptions had sown skepticism.

"The Census Bureau describes its goal for a successful decennial is to count each person once, only once, and in the right place," Lowenthal said. "To me a successful census is one that counts all communities equally well, and the disproportionate count of certain neighborhoods and groups has always been the Achilles' heel of the census. And I think all signs ... suggest that this census won't be more accurate than the last one and could be much less accurate."

Such concerns are pervasive enough that for the first time the Census Bureau has invited an outside task force to observe and assess its processes. The group, from the American Statistical Association, recently began working inside the bureau and will release reports later this year independently of the bureau's own quality assessments.

"I think the Census Bureau realized that there was a lot of controversy surrounding the 2020 Census, and a lot of concerns among a lot of stakeholders about the quality of it, and what they wanted to do was demonstrate that it was high-quality," said John Thompson, a former Census Bureau director and a member of the task force. "They really wanted an independent look at it."

In doing so, the bureau is taking the chance that the group will come up with different conclusions from its own internal analysis.

"We'll all have our fingers crossed that when it makes these reports it's going to be able to say that the bureau had a very successful census," said Kenneth Prewitt, a former bureau director who was recently named special adviser to the Census Bureau director. "But they won't say it if they don't believe it."

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