The latest lawsuit accuses the administration of wrongdoing to complete the decade-long census by September 30. It was submitted by the National Urban League, League of Woman Voters, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and several local government officials.
The timeline of the administration “ignores the Bureau’s preliminary conclusions that such rapid processing makes it impossible to fulfill its constitutional obligation to ensure reasonable quality and accuracy of 2020 census data,” the lawsuit claims. It asks a federal court in California to ask the administration to give the public more time to respond to the census, but it does not ask the court to ask Congress to change a December 31 deadline for submitting a number that is used to distribute the seats Congress.
The Department of Commerce referred questions to the Census Bureau, which declined to comment.
“We are beyond the window that we can get these counts by those dates at this point,” Al Fontenot, the bureau official leading the 2020 census, said last month.
But several former Census Bureau executives disagreed. Those decisions “will result in seriously incomplete enumerations in many areas of our country,” and especially among minority populations, they said recently.
“The end result would be too much rep for the White non-Hispanic population and greater undercounts for all other populations, including the traditional hard to count,” the most serving former census director, John Thompson, told Congress at a hearing He said it “critical is that these deadlines be extended.”
The Census Bureau said that about 64% of the households so far had responded to the count and that their field workers had followed up with one in four households not responding to the survey.
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