A federal judge added one month to the deadline for filing census documents.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, an Obama appointee serving the Northern District of California, ruled that the U.S. Census Bureau cannot halt the collection of census data at the end of the month despite the bureau’s claims that it needed to stop collecting by the last day of September to be able to finish the count by Dec. 31.
Attorneys for civil rights groups and a few municipal governments argued that it would not be possible for the Census Bureau to get an accurate count of citizens if data collection stops in September. They argued that they already had a shortened window of time to collect census data because of inaccuracies with the census that caused delays earlier this year.
Koh agreed and extended the deadline through the end of October. Her injunction also suspended the Dec. 31 deadline for the Census Bureau to report its data. The Census Bureau faces a Dec. 31 deadline to be able to report how many congressional seats each state will be allotted so that states can begin their redistricting.
The Census Bureau had been pressuring Congress to extend the deadline that sits on the final day of the year for reporting census data because of the pandemic, but the bureau suddenly halted its pursuit for an extension from Congress and agreed to end data collection on Sept. 30, a date the civil rights groups argued was arbitrary.
Attorneys for the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, have already announced plans to appeal Koh’s ruling, though she does not seem to care.
“Go ahead and appeal me,” Koh said after making her ruling.
