At Least Twelve States to Sue Trump Administration Over Census Citizenship Question
March 28, 2018 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Kenneth Prewitt, a director of the Census Bureau under President Clinton, dismissed the administration’s rationale that the question is needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
“It’s certainly unnecessary,” said Mr. Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. “The Voting Rights Act is being administered very well with data from the American Community Survey. The Justice Department has ruled on that a number of times over the last 15 years.”
The decision to add a question potentially throws a new degree of uncertainty into census preparations that already are well behind schedule and starved for money. The only full dress rehearsal of the 2020 census, unfolding this month in Providence County, R.I., has been scaled back in some areas. Tens of thousands of forms mailed to local residents this month do not contain the citizenship question.
Experts dismissed Mr. Ross’s statement that the citizenship question did not need further testing, arguing that the census and the American Community Survey differ in almost every aspect, from size to public awareness to whether a response is required. “When you do this once every 10 years, for 340 million people, you’ve got to get it right,” said William H. Frey, a University of Michigan demographer.
On Tuesday, critics of Mr. Ross’s decision made available a letter sent to Mr. Ross in January from six former directors of the Census Bureau who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The letter stated that they were “deeply concerned” that adding the citizenship question would “considerably increase the risks to the 2020 enumeration.”
“There is a great deal of evidence that even small changes in survey question order, wording and instructions can have significant, and often unexpected, consequences for the rate, quality and truthfulness of response,” said the former directors, who included Mr. Prewitt. “The effect of adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census on data quality and census accuracy, therefore, is completely unknown.”
Several of the states suing the Trump administration are run by Democrats, who risk losing representation if the census undercounts people of color.
