The House Oversight and Reform Committee obtained documents from an anonymous source at the Census Bureau showing that “unresolved errors may be more extensive than first reported.” The additional errors could hurt President Trump’s plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from population figures that determine House apportionment.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney sent a letter on Wednesday to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose agency oversees the Census Bureau, demanding a set of documents about the reported errors the committee requested last month but were never handed over due to “concerns about ongoing litigation.”
“Despite the Trump Administration’s obstruction, the Committee has now obtained several internal Census Bureau documents from another source that not only confirm these press reports, but indicate that unresolved errors may be more extensive than first reported,” Chairwoman Maloney wrote.
On Nov. 19, Census Bureau Director Steve Dillingham released a statement saying “certain processing anomalies have been discovered” during the bureau’s data-crunching phase. “I am directing the Census Bureau to utilize all resources available to resolve this as expeditiously as possible. As it has been all along, our goal remains an accurate and statistically sound Census,” he said, adding that “these types of processing anomalies have occurred in past censuses.”
The announcement exacerbated a tight deadline for the agency following a confusing back-and-forth of data collection deadline changes and court battles. According to the leaked documents, more anomalies have been discovered. “Career officials have now identified at least 15 anomalies that impact more than a million Census records across all 50 states,” Maloney wrote.
In three states, roughly 46,000 people were recorded as living in the wrong state as the result of a coding error. “If this error isn’t corrected demographic data for persons will be missed and may impact the final pop counts,” one of the documents read. Another “high complexity error” involving a mismatch between different data sets that created duplicated counts was present in all states. “If the issue isn’t fix[ed] there is a potential of overcount,” the document said.
Another document outlined the steps the bureau was taking to rectify the errors but noted that the fixes, called patches, could result in even further data anomalies “if the sequencing of patch deployment isn’t executed properly.”
In October, the Supreme Court ruled that Ross could end data collection ahead of the Oct. 31 deadline, so the bureau could attempt to meet a Dec. 31 deadline to submit population data to the president. Following the ruling, collection efforts were instructed to halt roughly two weeks ahead of schedule, forcing field reporters to condense the two remaining weeks of work into two days after the Supreme Court’s Oct. 13 ruling.
Data submitted by the Census Bureau is used to apportion states’ seats in the House and votes in the Electoral College until the next census and allocate federal funding to states. States also use it to redraw congressional district maps.
The bureau was straining to deliver the population counts to the president ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration so Trump could exclude illegal immigrants from the House apportionment formula. With these errors, the documents project the data will not be submitted to the White House until Jan. 23 — after Biden has already been sworn into office.
The Census Bureau said the estimated date for handing over apportionment data remains “in flux” and that the outlined anomalies “are expected and are similar to the Census Bureau’s experience in prior decennial censuses.”
“Internal tracking documents would not convey the uncertainty around projected dates and may fail to reflect the additional resources employed to correct data anomalies,” the bureau said. “The anomalies affect less than seven-tenths of one percent of records and are being resolved as expeditiously as possible.”
“No shortcuts are being taken when it comes to patching the software to correct these anomalies, or others that may be discovered as data processing continues, and resources are being added to post-data collection processing to ensure timely and accurate data is delivered for the Census Bureau’s important mission,” the bureau added.
The bureau did provide further comment.
Additionally, the Supreme Court has yet to decide whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to exclude illegal immigrants from population figures. The court appeared wary of approving any broad exclusion of illegal immigrants but wasn’t ready to throw its weight behind the plaintiffs either, citing uncertainty about how many illegal immigrants the bureau could identify in the first place and how much, if, at all, apportionment and federal funding would be affected.
“Your failure to cooperate with the Committee’s investigation appears to be part of a dangerous pattern of obstruction with the Census,” Maloney warned Ross. “You personally have played a key role in blocking the production of information to the Committee regarding the Trump Administration’s efforts to politicize the 2020 Census.”
