WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 headcount of Americans will end Thursday, after a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The traditional deadline for the once-a-decade headcount of U.S. residents is Sept. 30, but a flurry of recent federal court orders had extended that effort in the hope of obtaining more accurate tallies of minorities and hard-to-enumerate communities.
But the high court’s ruling Tuesday supported the Trump administration’s contention that the headcount had to end promptly in order for the Census Bureau to meet a Dec. 31 deadline to compile apportionment data used to determine states’ representation in Congress.
As of Oct. 13, Census officials say that 99.9 percent of U.S. households have been counted, with 33.1% counted by census takers and other field data collection operations, plus another 66.8% of housing units self-responding online, by phone or by mail.
The Census statistics for Utah are similar, with 99.9 percent of households also already counted. About 70.8 percent of those residents responded to the 10-item Census questionnaire online or by mail or phone. An additional 29.1 percent of households were counted by Census field workers during recent face-to-face visits conducted using precautions intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
With an estimated 701,281 households in the state, that means that only about 700 Utah households still remain to be counted by late Thursday.
Census workers will continue trying to reach non-responding households through Thursday. Residents can also respond to the Census either by mail or phone until then.
Utahns can respond to the Census online at www.2020census.gov.
If residents download the Census questionnaire from that website, the form must be returned via the U.S. Postal Service and postmarked by Oct. 15.
Utah residents can also respond by phone. Callers seeking an English-speaking Census operator should call 844-330-2020. To reach a Spanish-speaking Census operator, residents should call 844-468-2020.
The Census deadline had been Oct. 31, as a result of a ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California in late September. The Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday overturned that decision.
Critics of the abrupt end of the Census count say the Supreme Court’s ruling is a double victory for the Trump administration.
Their presumption is that the majority of remaining uncounted households are likely occupied by minority members who may be illegal aliens. President Donald Trump had previously sought to exclude such non-citizens from 2020 apportionment data.
The shortened deadline will also allow the Trump administration to control the process of compiling that population data, regardless of the outcome of the November general election.