Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — I’d say we won’t know for some time, and that not knowing is itself the problem.

The count was suspended in the spring, the schedule was compressed, the end date moved more than once and finally landed in mid-October after the Supreme Court allowed the shortened deadline. Then last month the Bureau said it had found data anomalies and would miss the statutory deadline for delivering apportionment numbers.

For a state like ours this isn’t abstract. We have one at-large seat, enormous distances, tribal lands where enumeration is difficult in an ordinary decade, and a substantial share of housing that isn’t a permanent address. Nonresponse followup is how you count those places, and nonresponse followup is exactly what got compressed.

An undercount here doesn’t cost us a seat because we can’t go below one. It costs us formula money for ten years, and it costs it quietly.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent — Michigan has been losing a seat every decade for as long as I’ve been alive and we’re expecting to lose another one.

What I’d want to know is whether we’re losing it because people left or because people weren’t counted, and I don’t think anyone will be able to answer that with confidence.

The Bureau does a post-enumeration survey to estimate the error. That survey exists precisely for this and it’ll be more important this decade than it’s ever been. It’ll also be published long after the numbers have been used.

That’s the structural problem with a census. The count is used immediately and audited slowly, and the audit doesn’t change anything.

Orange County, California Correspondent — The financial consequence is the part I’d emphasize because it’s larger than people assume and it’s mechanical.

Federal formula funding tied to census population runs to something like a trillion and a half dollars annually across all programs. A one percent undercount in a state isn’t a rounding error, it’s a compounding loss for a decade, and it lands on the exact populations that were hardest to count.

California is the state with the most to lose here — large immigrant population, high rates of shared and irregular housing, and a July directive attempting to exclude undocumented residents from the apportionment base that was argued at the Court last week.

Whatever happens to that case, the directive did damage independent of its legality, because it was announced while enumerators were still knocking on doors. You cannot tell a population that its participation may be used against it and then expect the participation.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — I want to raise something that will sound peripheral and is not.

Being counted by a state is not a neutral experience everywhere, and for a substantial number of people in your country it isn’t either. A census is an act of a government identifying its residents, and populations with a history of that identification being used against them respond accordingly, whatever assurances are given.

My region’s experience of enumeration runs through colonial administration, and the memory of what registers were for outlasted the administrations that kept them.

The specific American difficulty this year is that the assurance and the threat were issued by the same government within months of each other. An enumerator saying the data are confidential, in the same season as a directive to exclude a category of resident from the count’s principal use, is asking for a trust that the government itself has just undermined.

That is not a technical failure. It is a political decision with a technical consequence, and the consequence lasts ten years.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — The litigation record here is going to matter more than the count, and I’d summarize it because it’s been covered badly.

The Bureau asked Congress for a four-month extension in April. Congress didn’t act. The Bureau then reversed itself in August and shortened the schedule instead, which is the decision that produced the lawsuits. A district court enjoined the shortened deadline, the Supreme Court stayed that injunction in October, and counting stopped.

Separately, the July memorandum on excluding certain residents from apportionment was argued at the Court a week ago on the question of whether anybody has standing to challenge it yet, which is frequently how a case gets disposed of without answering the question.

What this leaves is a count taken under a schedule that the agency’s own career staff said was insufficient, delivered late, with an unresolved question about who goes in the denominator.

Redistricting will proceed on those numbers anyway, in every state, and every map drawn from them will be litigated. That’s the decade this produced.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — Texas is gaining seats and I’m still going to complain, which should tell you it isn’t a partisan point.

The hardest places to count in my part of the state are rural, poor, and frequently in housing that doesn’t have a conventional address — a trailer behind a house, a converted building, a place with no mail delivery. Those are counted by a person walking up to a door, and that’s the operation that got compressed.

The people who don’t get counted in East Texas are not a demographic anybody in a national argument is thinking about. They’re the same people who show up in every other undercount, and they’ll be underserved in every formula for ten years.

I’d add that a census taken during a pandemic, in a year when trust in federal institutions was what it was, was going to have a problem regardless of the schedule. The schedule made it worse. It didn’t create it.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent — Florida is gaining and there’s a real question here about gaining enough.

We received an extraordinary volume of new residents over the decade and a substantial number of them arrived recently, in rental housing, in exactly the categories that are hardest to enumerate. Our self-response rate lagged the national figure.

The practical consequence for a fast-growing state is that you’re apportioned on a number that’s already old and possibly low. Then you spend the decade building schools and roads for a population you’re not funded for, and the correction arrives in 2031.

I’d have preferred a slower, later, more expensive count. Nobody wanted to pay for it and now everyone will.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — Ten years of formula money for a county runs through this number, and I can tell you what it funds because I write the applications.

Road funds. Transit formula. Community development block grants. Health programs. Almost every federal dollar that arrives here arrives against a population figure, and if the figure is low the county absorbs the difference in services it doesn’t provide.

We spent real effort on outreach this year in the outlying counties and I still expect we’re short. The follow-up visits happened in a compressed window, during a pandemic, by enumerators knocking on doors of people who had been told for months not to open them to strangers.

Nobody did anything malicious. A great many reasonable decisions produced a bad count, which is the usual way that happens.

The thing I’d ask for is that the post-enumeration estimate get published loudly and that formula programs be permitted to use it. If we know the count was short and we’re forbidden to use the correction, we’ve made a decision to underfund on purpose.