Commerce Department announces Oct. 5 ‘target date,’ despite federal order against ending count early
Days after a judge ordered the Census Bureau to continue enumerating for another month beyond its current Sept. 30 deadline, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the agency, announced Monday he intends to end all in-person counting efforts next week.
“The Secretary of Commerce has announced a target date of October 5, 2020 to conclude 2020 Census self-response and field data collection operations,” according to a Census Bureau announcement made on Twitter and on its website.
Plaintiffs in a lawsuit and census experts argued a shortened census count would risk missing or double counting people, skewing the results. Because of delays earlier in the year related to the coronavirus pandemic, the administration originally postponed certain counting deadlines and sought a four-month legislative extension of when it needed to delivery census totals to the White House. But it abandoned that effort after President Donald Trump signed a memorandum in July trying to exclude undocumented immigrants from apportionment. Continue reading.