Do you care about the 2020 census?
Literally every American social program uses census numbers to allocate resources.
Transportation grants and education grants, among others, are distributed proportionally.
If the numbers are off, the hospital gets mis-sitedand the vets dont get health care.
Prewitt continues, Or take emergency relief.
If theyre wrong, they dont find people.
If you want your community to have the services it needs, your neighbors need to be counted.
Running an accurate census takes money.
Thompson stepped down amidst budget disputes.
Prewitt tells me, Right now they are underfunded.
Not enough money means not enough workers to conduct the census, and that means people will be undercounted.
People who are undercounted are invisible.
Fair representation hinges on a fair census.
The census determines how the 435 members of the House are allocated among the states.
Every decade the population goes up in some states and down in others, and reps are redistributed accordingly.
You need a director who knows what theyre doing.
Especially the high-powered math statisticians.
They love the census because it is abig deal, says Prewitt.
A skeleton crew is not going to get a good count.
Everyone wants a good census.
This is a bipartisan issue.
Prewitt notes: The business community wants good numbers.
They dont want to mis-locate a Wal-Mart because they misunderstood the population base.
In some respects the commercial sector is one of the best defenders of a quality census.
But one could put ones finger on the scale, either deliberately or through underfunding.
In fairly quiet ways, small ways, you’ve got the option to selectively undercount.
You do it by where you spend your advertising dollar.
You do it by where you put your best staff.
You do it by where you open up offices.
The time to take action is now.
Planning, testing, and advertising efforts need to get underwaynow.
You cant postpone the censusits constitutionally mandated to occur every ten years whether were ready or not.
And you cant re-do a botched census.
Which means we need totalk to our reps(and our other community leaders) now.
I dont know how you get the average citizen to pay attention to it until its too late.
Thats the really scary thing, warns Prewitt.
Pressure your reps to care.
Indeed a bigger census than George Washingtons in 1790.
He can actually be responsible for the biggest and best census ever done.
Somebody start a hashtag.
