In addition to being April Fool’s Day and AirTalk’s anniversary, April 1st also gets to be Census Day once every ten years. Census Day isn’t so much an event -- the U.S. Census Bureau has been mailing out forms to households since early March -- but the day around which the Census’ main question is based: Where do we live, and who lives there with us?
This time around, however, will be no ordinary decennial Census. COVID-19 has forced the Census Bureau to suspend its on-the-ground outreach programs, meaning no door-knocking to encourage people to respond. Americans can still respond online (you will need your 12-digit Census ID that came in the mail) or in person, but the challenges posed by the outbreak means more work to ensure an accurate count.
Today on AirTalk, we’ll hear about how different the Census will be while the coronavirus outbreak is also going on and share information on what you can do to make sure that you and your family are counted this year.
For more information on the 2020 Census, including a link where you can respond online, click here. To see more self-response rates from the U.S. Census Bureau, click here.
With guest host A Martínez
Guest:
Terri Ann Lowenthal, census expert and consultant for the Funders’ Census Initiative 2020, a coalition of foundations and philanthropic-serving organizations that support a fair and accurate census; she served as staff director of the House Census Oversight Subcommittee from 1987-1994 and covered Census Bureau and broader federal statistical activities for the 2008 Obama Presidential Transition Team