In 2010 only 77 percent of Nassau County residents sent back their U.S. Census Bureau questionnaires, resulting in an estimated 316,000 people not being counted.
This was a problem.
The population data collected by the Census Bureau is used by the federal government to distribute more than $880 billion annually to hundreds of federal programs, including Medicaid, Medicare and other health initiatives, education, transportation and infrastructure.
Census data is also used by businesses to decide where to set up shop or relocate.
And it determines political representation, both on the federal and local level. This includes how many electoral votes each state receives.
County Executive Laura Curran responded to the undercount in Nassau in February when she launched a campaign to ensure that Nassau residents are accurately counted in the 2020 Census.
This included putting together Nassau’s Complete Count Committee, a group comprised of more than 30 nonprofit, labor, faith-based groups and community organizations tasked with developing a plan to achieve a full count.
This makes sense, but don’t expect a better result for Nassau in 2020. In fact, you might need to expect a much worse outcome for the county for two reasons.
The first is that Nassau is a difficult place to get an accurate population count.
The U.S. Census Bureau calculates Nassau as the fifth hardest-to-count county in the state — behind Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), Bronx and Suffolk counties — because of its high proportion of typically undercounted groups, which includes communities of color, immigrants, young children and renters.
This isn’t surprising. Long Island has one of the 10 largest populations of undocumented immigrants from Central and South America, according to an op-ed by Congressmen Tom Suozzi and Peter King that appeared in the New York Times on March 24.
About 23 percent of Nassau’s population — more than 316,000 people — live in “hard-to-count” communities such as Hempstead, Freeport, Uniondale, Lakeview, Elmont, Valley Stream, Long Beach, Glen Cove and Great Neck, according to a Newsday report.
The second reason to be concerned about the 2020 count is the Trump administration and the five Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republican presidents.
The five Republican-appointed justices appeared inclined to rule last week in the Commerce Department’s favor on an appeal that would allow the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
The appeal, which challenges a ruling by a federal district court judge in New York, focuses on whether Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, followed the proper procedures set out in federal law when he sought to include the question: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
Research by Ross’s own Census Bureau shows the question is likely to discourage households with non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, from taking part in the count. The bureau estimates 6.5 million people will not respond to the 2020 census if a citizenship question is included – and could grow higher.
But Ross overruled the unanimous advice of experts at the Census Bureau to add the question.
In lawsuits brought by dozens of states, cities and other groups, judges in New York, California and Maryland agreed that Ross broke federal rules when he set out to include the citizenship question. They also found that the citizenship question will lead to a grossly disproportionate undercount in certain states, such as New York.
The judges were supported by six of the Census Bureau’s former directors, who have served under both Democratic and Republican administrations and warned that adding the citizenship question would jeopardize the accuracy of the population count.
Ross testified repeatedly before Congress that he added the citizenship question because the Justice Department wanted it on the census form.
But litigation filed by the opponents uncovered emails from Ross and other Commerce Department officials showing the idea of adding the citizenship question did not have its roots in the Justice Department.
Instead, the emails showed, the question was developed in discussions between Ross, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped lead President Trump’s now-defunct and widely discredited voter fraud commission.
The Trump administration’s position is supported by 17 Republican-controlled states.
This is unsurprising since they would be the beneficiaries of the citizenship question being included in the census form.
“Allowing the administration to demand citizenship information from every household as part of the decennial census would dramatically depress the county areas with significant Latino and immigrant populations and would reposition representation toward areas more likely to elect Republicans,” former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post.
There’s a troubling pattern here.
It doesn’t take much of an effort to see the connection between the handling of the census question and the GOP’s effort in states across the country to suppress the vote of young people and minority members who tend to vote for Democrats. Or gerrymandered congressional districts.
This is further aggravated by the heavy rural state bias in the U.S. Senate (a majority of the country’s population is represented by just 18 senators).
The impact of this rural red state bias can be seen in who was affected by the 10 percent cap on state and local taxes in President Trump’s tax bill – blue states with large immigrant populations and relatively high levels of spending on social programs.
There is nothing we can do now to influence the Supreme Court in what may turn out to seem like a blatantly political decision. But the least we can do is work together to get every person in the county counted – despite the long odds.
