Local groups work to prevent undercounting in 2020 Census

As preparations ramp up for the United States Census in 2020, organizations are working to encourage local governments to update their address lists in order to avoid undercounting the state’s marginalized populations.

“Census figures are used for innumerable policy and political decisions both by government and by businesses,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York. 

Lerner said hundreds of billions of dollars in federal money is allocated to states, sometimes on a population basis, and if an area’s population was miscounted, it could lose both political power and federal funds.

Undercounting can also cause states to lose political representation in Congress and the Electoral College. If a state’s population appears to drop relative to other states, it risks losing representatives, according to a report by Common Cause NY published earlier this month. Similarly, local areas that are undercounted can lose funding and representation at the state level.

In 2000, New York’s population was undercounted by about 209,000 people, said Jeffrey Wice, a Jaeckle Center Fellow with the State University of New York University at Buffalo Law School. In 1990, the state undercounted the population by 272,000 people.

For context, a New York State Assembly district is composed of 170,000 people and a State Senate district has around 300,000 people, Wice said.

Furthermore, certain populations — such as black and Latinx people, immigrants, residents of rural areas and low-income people — are historically more likely to be undercounted than other groups, according to the Common Cause NY report. This undercounting can diminish the political influence and financial resources of already-marginalized populations.

Common Cause NY is encouraging local governments across the state to enroll in a U.S. Census Bureau program called Local Update of Census Addresses operation to combat undercounting of marginalized groups.

LUCA is designed for local governments — such as indigenous nations, counties and towns — to check the list of addresses the Census Bureau has on file and submit any corrections that are needed so census questionnaires are delivered to all residents in a particular jurisdiction.

“The (LUCA) program is important because the governmental agencies closest to the ground — the towns or villages, the counties — know better where there’s unusual housing to be found in their locations,” Lerner said.

For instance, some rural counties in New York have higher percentages of migrant farmworkers who live in nonstandard housing that may not have a standardized address. The LUCA operation provides a way for local officials to notify the Census Bureau so the agency knows where to send census questionnaires when the time comes, Lerner said.

Those local municipalities have until Dec. 15 to sign up. As of Sunday, nine New York counties had signed up to participate in LUCA, according to the Census Bureau website.

Wice said because of the state’s large immigrant population, New York is particularly vulnerable to undercounting on the Census, especially with the Trump administration’s focus on immigration enforcement.

“People are hesitant or afraid to come out and be counted by the Census Bureau for fear of immigration or police or other kinds of law enforcement that might jeopardize their status,” Wice said.

After the enrollment period for the LUCA program ends, Wice said, the next step is to raise awareness about the Census through community organizations and leaders to convince as many people as possible to respond to the questionnaires — especially in areas that are statistically considered hard-to-count because of their demographics.

“The Census is not an immigration authority,” Wice said. “It is not out to find (people) if they have legal status issues — it’s simply to make sure that New York gets as best a number as possible.”

Lerner said her organization is hoping to encourage citizens to pressure their local governments to sign up for LUCA.

“What we’re trying to do is to call more attention to the need for the localities to be more responsive and to give citizens the ability to hold their localities accountable for getting an accurate count,” Lerner said.