An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities--GOP wants to cut Census funding!!

[riversedge]

http://prospect.org/article/insidious-way-underrepresent-minorities


An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities

Gary D. Bass & Adrien Schless-Meier

November 5, 2015

Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid.

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(Photo: AP/Jason E. Miczek)

Local efforts on the ground promoted the 2010 census, but will they be there in 2020?

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority populations are in danger of losing representation in Congress as well as their share of more than $400 billion a year in federal funds for health care, education, job training, and community development. That possibility should get anyone’s attention, yet few have noticed that it will be the likely result if Congress cuts the budget for the U.S. Census Bureau to the extent it now threatens to do.

The Constitution requires a decennial census to determine congressional apportionment, and federal law relies on the numbers to allocate funds among states and localities. Historically, the census has missed large numbers of people in poverty and racial and ethnic minorities. By the 2000 and 2010 censuses, however, the national undercount had dropped to less than 2 percent, due primarily to the Census Bureau’s dogged determination to walk America’s streets and knock on the doors of the roughly 100 million U.S. residents who didn’t mail back their forms. Racial and ethnic minorities were still more likely to be missed than whites. But the Census Bureau could not have reduced the disparity in counting minorities without budgetary support.

Now, Congress is insisting that the Census Bureau spend less preparing for and conducting the 2020 census than it did on the 2010 census, even though the U.S. population is expected to have grown by more than 25 million people by 2020. The bureau has chosen not to fight this directive, which census experts call delusional. Instead, the bureau has embarked on a high-risk strategy to save $5 billion by rolling back door-to-door canvassing and conducting a largely electronic, Internet-based census.

Adoption of new information technologies would be good for the census and likely would save money. But the bureau’s all-encompassing overhaul may be too ambitious and complex to pull off in the time remaining, especially given the resource constraints Congress has imposed. Delays in the bureau’s schedule could result in “another HealthCare.gov,” warned Carol Cha, lead technology expert for the Government Accountability Office, in recent Senate testimony.
About a quarter of all those counted in the 2010 census came from face-to-face non-response follow-up, and this process is critical for reaching people of color who tend to be harder to contact by mail.

What’s more, civil-rights advocates worry that the bureau’s plan won’t be as effective in reaching communities of color and immigrant populations even if all the technology works well. About a quarter of all those counted in the 2010 census came from face-to-face non-response follow-up, and this process is critical for reaching people of color who tend to be harder to contact by mail. The bureau is hoping that digital “in-office” canvassing using government and commercial databases will be just as good to prepare for the 2020 census, but that is as unproven as the technology itself.

Success is possible only if Congress makes the necessary upfront investment to develop, test, and refine the bureau’s new systems. As Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) puts it, “We have to spend millions now to save billions later.” Congress also should be prepared to accept higher costs than expected if tests show savings are coming at the expense of accuracy..........................

[Iliyah]

1. GOPers want a one party rule system in the USA

[saturnsring]

2. and the dems will hand it to them by not voting and petty in-party bickering

[brush]

3. They also want to hide that their base is rapidly approaching being a minority . . .

also, which wasn't supposed to happen until 2040 or so.

Hell, it might have already happened.

[Recoverin_Republican]

4. GOP: trying everything they can think of to replace Democracy with Plutocracy..