Owatonna, MN Correspondent — Minnesota is the state with the most direct stake in this and most people here know it.
In 2010 we kept our eighth congressional seat by fewer than nine thousand people. That was the last seat apportioned in the entire country. Had the count gone slightly differently, it would have gone to North Carolina.
We’re on the same bubble now, and the count that decides it was taken under a compressed schedule during a pandemic.
I’d make a narrower point than the political one. A seat is a discrete thing — you have it or you don’t — and the margin is smaller than the plausible error in the count. That means the apportionment of at least one seat this decade is going to be decided by measurement noise rather than by population.
That’s always been true and nobody minds when the count is ordinary. This year it isn’t ordinary and everyone will notice.
Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — We’re expecting to lose a seat and we’ve been expecting it for years, so the count isn’t really the story here.
The story is that West Virginia has been shrinking for most of my life, and a census is when the country makes that official.
I’d tell you what that feels like in a place like this, because it isn’t a technical matter locally. Every ten years a number arrives confirming that more people left, and the political consequence is that the state has less say in what happens to it, which is a strange loop for a place whose problem is that people leave because there’s nothing here.
The count could be perfect and the outcome would be the same. What the disruption adds is a reason to doubt a number that was going to be painful anyway, and doubt of that kind doesn’t help anybody here.
Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — Ohio expects to lose a seat too, and I’d put it in the same category as a plant announcement.
A number arrives that describes something that happened gradually and was visible to anybody paying attention, and it’s treated as news.
The manufacturing view of this is about the instrument rather than the result. A measurement taken under changed conditions, with a compressed schedule and a different methodology in the follow-up phase, is not comparable to the previous one. In quality work you’d flag that and constrain what you use it for.
We’re going to use it for everything, unconstrained, for ten years. Nobody will note the measurement conditions anywhere the number gets used.
That’s the part that troubles me more than whether the count is high or low. It’s that we’ll treat it as precise.
Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — There’s a piece of this that’s specific to a military city and it’s genuinely complicated.
Active-duty personnel stationed here are counted here. Personnel deployed overseas are counted to a home of record for apportionment purposes, which may be a state they haven’t lived in for a decade.
We had a lot of people deployed this year and a lot of movement generally. I don’t know how the count handled that and I’d guess it handled it imperfectly.
The consequence is local. Formula money for schools and roads follows the resident count, and a base community has a population that fluctuates by thousands on orders nobody in the city controls.
Nobody outside a Navy town thinks about this. Every Navy town does, every decade, and we never get a satisfactory answer.
Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — We were counted in the worst possible year for counting this valley.
The enumeration ran through a period when the properties were closed, a hundred thousand people were out of work, and a meaningful number of them left — went back to family in California or Arizona or the Philippines, some intending to return and some not.
Where were they on April 1? Wherever they slept, technically. In practice a great many of them were in transition, in a rental they were about to give up, not answering a door.
A transient service workforce is hard to count in a good year. This wasn’t one. My guess is we’re materially short and there’s no way to prove it.
Ten years of formula money for a valley that’s going to grow again the moment travel returns, set by a snapshot taken at the bottom.
Myrtle Beach Correspondent — Coastal counties have a structural counting problem and it’s about the difference between where people are and where they live.
We have an enormous number of second homes, seasonal rentals, and people who spend part of the year here and are counted somewhere else. Then we have a workforce that’s partly seasonal and lives in housing that doesn’t look like housing on a list.
The count says we’re a certain size. The actual demand on roads, water, and emergency services is a different and larger number for a good part of the year.
That was true before the pandemic and the pandemic made it stranger, because a lot of people who normally leave stayed, and a lot of people who normally come didn’t.
I don’t think anybody counted this place accurately and I don’t think anybody ever has.
Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — Arizona is gaining and I’d expect us to gain a seat, so I’d rather talk about the funding than the apportionment.
The formula money that follows population disproportionately funds programs for children — school lunch, Title I, health coverage for low-income families, special education grants. Those formulas run on census counts of children under five, and children under five have been the most persistently undercounted group in every recent census.
That undercount is chronic and it was going to be worse this year, because the households hardest to reach are also the households most likely to have young children.
So the population most affected by an undercount is the one that had no capacity to participate in it, and the effect runs through their entire school career.
I’d want that stated whenever this gets discussed as an apportionment story. Apportionment is one number. The formulas touch a child every day for a decade.
Gastonia, NC Correspondent — North Carolina has spent the last decade in court over maps and I’d expect the next decade to look the same, so I’m reading this as somebody who has edited a great deal of that coverage.
Here’s what worries me editorially. Every map drawn from this count will be challenged, and the challenge will now have an additional argument available — that the underlying data are unreliable because of how the count was conducted.
That argument will be made by whichever side loses, in every state, regardless of merit. And it will sometimes be right, which is what makes it corrosive.
We’ve spent four years watching what happens when a factual foundation becomes contestable. The census was one of the last widely trusted federal numbers. Whatever the actual quality of the count, the process has handed everyone a reason to dispute it, and disputes of that kind don’t resolve.
Sydney, Australia Correspondent — Ours is conducted by a statistical agency whose head is a statutory appointment, participation is compulsory, and the date is fixed by legislation rather than by anyone’s discretion.
I mention that not to recommend it — compulsion is a different tradition and I doubt it would transfer — but to isolate the variable.
The disruption you experienced wasn’t primarily the pandemic. It was that the schedule, the methodology, and the definition of who counts were all contestable in the middle of the exercise, by an administration with an interest in the outcome. Ours weren’t available to be contested, because they aren’t in anybody’s discretion to change.
A pandemic would have disrupted our count too. It couldn’t have produced litigation about the deadline, because the deadline isn’t a decision.
If there’s a lesson available it’s that the fragility was structural and the virus found it.
Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — One seat, and we keep it regardless. So the apportionment fight isn’t ours.
What’s ours is the money, and the money is formulas.
An undercount here is quiet. Nobody announces it. A county just receives somewhat less for ten years than it should have, and nobody in it will ever know that’s what happened.
I’d want the correction published and I’d want programs allowed to use it. If we know the number is wrong and we’re required to use it anyway, we’ve chosen to be wrong on purpose, and I don’t see how anybody defends that at a budget hearing.
