Lawsuit Claims Census Takers Pressured to Falsify Data
A lawsuit filed by advocacy groups and local governments Tuesday claimed that census takers were being pressured by their supervisors to falsify data.
The lawsuit alleged that falsifying census data was made so that the U.S. Census Bureau could claim it reached 99.9% of households with the survey's conclusion two weeks ago.
Associated Press said supervisors pressured census workers into filing as many questionnaires as possible.
According to the lawsuit, many census workers were forced to guess how many people lived in a home.
Some also allegedly made false claims that neighborhoods were too dangerous to visit or that people refused to answer when they did.
Filed in San Jose by the National Urban League, that lawsuit claimed that it was done to end the census early.
By ending it faster, the numbers can be crunched by the statistical agency while Trump is still in office, regardless of who wins the election.
Some households in Baltimore and Southern California were marked as completed after only one attempt to reach residents living there, according to the revised lawsuit.
The same thing goes for some households in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, said CBS San Francisco.
"Instructions such as those identified above suggested to enumerators that they should falsify data to close cases quickly," read the complaint.
The disregard for accuracy could allow for the exclusion of undocumented immigrants once congressional sets are portioned out.
This will enforce a presidential order excluding the group.
But federal courts in California and New York have ruled that the order was unconstitutional and unlawful.
The Supreme Court allowed the administration to end the census early. Officials argued that the earlier end date was needed to meet the end-of-year deadline in reporting census results to the White House.
In an effort to prevent the early end date, a coalition of local governments and advocacy groups sued the administration. They also pleaded to extend the deadline for turning in apportionment numbers to April 2021.
The White House said in court papers last week that courts should not interfere with meeting the deadline.
Census data will be used in apportionment of congressional seat and in the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending.
Census Relied on Other Methods
According to the lawsuit, the Census Bureau also relied heavily on other methods other than interviewing.
It claimed that those less accurate methods relied on administrative records like IRS returns or interviewing neighbors and landlords.
Others also simply took a head count rather than getting residents' details like race, sex, age, Hispanic origin and relationship to each other.
Households were allowed to fill out the census online in light of the coronavirus pandemic, noted The Hill.
"Defendants cut many corners and made decisions that do not bear a reasonable relationship to the accomplishment of an actual enumeration," the complaint read.
It continued, saying the non-direct methods would be less accurate. The complaint said these methods will have a profound effect on immigrants and minorities - "the hard-to-count populations."
In the dissenting opinion wrote by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she said rushing this year's census had "irreparable" harms.
Check these out:
Supreme Court Allows Temporary Halt to 2020 Census
White House Seeks to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants from Census Data
Could Latino Voters Tip the Election to Favor Trump?
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