abraham lincoln elf expressed the desire to preserve in a time of civil war a government that was “of the people, by the people, for the people”. What he did not say is that such government has also always been for the data, by the data, and sometimes for the data. Democratic government has been fundamentally data-driven for a very long time. Representation in the US depends on a constitutional requirement, established at the foundation, for an “actual survey” of the population every 10 years: a census designed to ensure that the people are accurately represented, on their correct locations and in relation to their relative numbers.
A complete national score is always a monumental task, but the most recent current summary has faced unprecedented challenges. The 2020 census first had to overcome the Trump administration’s ill-considered attempt to add a citizenship question. Then it spent half the year in the field and tense to count every person during a pandemic that made knocking on strangers’ doors particularly difficult. A series of devastating hurricanes and wildfires contributed to the challenge. And yet, at the end of April 2021, the professional staff of the American Census Bureau succeeded in fulfilling the constitution’s mandate and revealed the population totals at the state level, which translated it into a division of the 435 seats of the American House and a corresponding number of votes in the Electoral College. (The division took place automatically according to an algorithm called “equal proportions” or “Huntington-Hill,” prescribed by law.) Now, just last month, we learned that some of those numbers were most likely wrong.
The Census Bureau’s Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) went back into the field, surveyed a sample of people from across the country, and then compared the new, more in-depth survey with the results of the census. By analyzing this comparison, the bureau now estimates that the 2020 census was counted in eight states and counted in six. To give a sense of the extent of these errors, the PES reported with 90 percent confidence that New York’s state population ranges from 400,000 to more than 1 million additional people, or 1.89 to 4.99 percent of the population. , has been recounted. Given the circumstances of the count, such low error rates should be considered impressive, and yet such differences can have major consequences when the last seat in the U.S. House since 1940 was decided by as few as 89 people and no more than 17,000. not. . Many of the initial comments on the PES results focused on the horse racing implications of the errors, pointing out that more of the states counted were blue states, while more of those counted were red. The errors, which apparently favor one party over another, were even described as a ‘scandal’ and the census was written off as a ‘bust’.
These are overreactions, and yet the question remains: What should we do about these small but both statistically and politically significant mistakes?
This is a mystery that our nation’s leaders have been grappling with since its inception. Over the course of the last century, two different approaches dominated. One is dependent on using money and energy to mobilize more census takers and to other systemic reforms that prevent mistakes. The others involve statisticians who have worked to develop techniques that can accurately measure errors and then make corrections to the census statements. Both of these approaches remain important, and yet the scale of the 2020 error counts suggests that an older method of dealing with census errors needs to be revived: we need to expand the House and the Electoral College so that few or no states lose representation in the face of an uncertain score. We must try to count better and correct what mistakes we can, but our democracy will be more robust if we also lower the input of each census. Representation does not have to be a zero-sum game.
The earliest known Reference to a census count came from Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, who wrote in 1791 about the previous year’s census, the country’s first. Jefferson wrote to his correspondents in Europe assuring them that the American population was a few percentage points larger than what was officially declared. It’s hard to say if that was the case, but the story makes clear that concerns about omissions and understatements began more than two centuries ago. In the ensuing decades, disasters and administrative failures caused serious omissions, such as when the official charged with counting Alabama’s residents died in office before completing his work on the 1820 census, or when many of California’s records (including the entire San Francisco County) burned. to the 1850 census.