Indianz.Com > News > Cronkite News: Tribes continue fight for accurate Census count
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With clock ticking – and state lagging – Census court fight continues
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Cronkite News
WASHINGTON – A see-saw legal battle over the 2020 Census continued Friday, with the government pushing to end the count in just five days while local governments, including two Arizona tribes, hoped to extend it to October 31.
It comes as state officials are scrambling to improve Arizona’s census
response rate,
which was ninth-lowest in the country Friday at 94.7%. Response rates for the Navajo Nation and Gila River Indian Community, which are part of the suit to extend the census, are just a fraction of the state rate.
At stake are millions in federal aid for local governments and representation in Congress, all of which are based on an accurate decennial census.
“These Census numbers will decide formulas for funding and political representation for the next 10 years,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said Friday.
Need help completing your census questionnaire? Census staff will be onsite TODAY(9/29) from 8:30am-1:00pm at the…
Posted by Gila River Indian Community on Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Ensuring an accurate census count is difficult in a typical year in tribal areas, where enumerators are often faced with rural terrain, limited broadband access, cultural and language barriers. Those challenges have only been heightened by COVID-19, which forced a delay in the census schedule and hit some parts of Indian Country particularly hard. The pandemic has also scrambled the Census Bureau timeline for completing its count and delivering a report to the president by December 31 as required by law. After being forced to halt operations for eight weeks this spring, the bureau came out with a revised schedule. It pushed the original ending date from July 31 to October 31 and set a new date to deliver its report to the president in April – a move that would require congressional approval. But on August 3, the bureau released a “replan” that moved the end date up to Sept. 30 and restored the December 31 deadline to report to the president. In her ruling, however, Koh cited several instances when Census officials said it would be “ludicrous” to accelerate the schedule in hopes of meeting the December 31 deadline. She noted a May 26 presentation by Timothy Olson, the bureau’s associate director for field operations, in which he said, “We have passed the point where we could even meet the current legislative requirement of December 31. We can’t do that anymore … we’ve passed that for quite a while now.”U.S. District Court rules in favor of Navajo Nation and co-plaintiffs to allow Census count to continue through October, appeal expected pic.twitter.com/BwU3ai8A7m
— Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez (@NNPrezNez) September 25, 2020
Get Out the Vote & Census Virtual Rally!
Posted by Gila River Broadcasting Corporation on Saturday, September 19, 2020
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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