Four years after the last census, almost a dozen small communities in the Midwest are going to be counted again in hopes of getting a new grocery store or more state funding to build roads, fire stations and parks.
Eleven small cities in Illinois and Iowa are the only municipalities so far to have signed agreements with the U.S. Census Bureau for a second count of their residents in 2024 and 2025, in a repeat of what happened during the 2020 census. The first year in which the special censuses can be conducted is 2024.
They should honestly consider re-doing the whole damn thing.
I never got anything from the census. Literally I’m not in there. COVID fucked it.
I’m not the only one.
I’m not even in the midwest.
If they don’t re-do it we’ll be dealing with budgets based on bad data for 6 more years before the next census.
Oh… it wasn’t Covid that fucked it,
They don’t actually go around to every single household in the country, they don’t have the resources for that since 99% of the people who conduct it are ‘volunteers’ (not unpaid, but the Census Bureau is not their main job)
Census enumerators might be temporary workers, but they are far from volunteers. And in person data collection still traditionally was a huge part of their jobs. Sure, most people they get by mailing a questionnaire. But there are lots of people with no fixed address, such as people that live in RVs, vans, cars, or are homeless. The census calls them transients. For days in late March and Early April, census enumerators go to areas they gather and frequent and try to get a count. There are also millions that don’t fill out their forms, and census enumerators are sent to follow up to try and get a count. Some are just lazy or forgetful, some are fearful of being found (such as immigrants), while others are stanch anti-government types, but whatever the reason, they try to get a count.
So much of this legwork was not done in 2020. Some of it due to COVID, some due to Trump wanting to undercount liberal areas.
Yeah, my point is I never got anything in my mailbox even. I know a lot of them do mail-in forms. I got a mail-in form in the 2010 census. I got nothing in 2020.