On Thursday, December 5, 2024, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing titled, “Oversight of the U.S. Census Bureau,” with Census Director Robert L. Santos as the lone witness. A full video of the hearing can be viewed on the Committee’s website.
Led by Chairman Comer’s opening statement, much of the hearing focused on the Census Bureau’s report card of the accuracy of the 2020 count, compiled through their Post Enumeration Survey (PES) which in a sense is a smaller sample survey much like the Census to compare and contrast findings in the two surveys. Much of the question and answer portion of the hearing focused on the PES findings of state overcounts and undercounts, and why more “Republican led” states had undercounts, while more of the states with overcounts were “Democrat states.”
Ranking Member Raskin, in his opening statement, provided a fuller context of the conduct of the 2020 head count, including the unprecedented challenges it faced in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as weather and wildfire events that disproportionately impacted individual states. The PES was released in May of this year, and various press accounts at that time provided a broad range of causes behind the why some states had overcounts and others had undercounts, which has been true in every Census since the Bureau has provided a PES-like report card after the fact. The Census Project, for instance, previously posted a blog about a deep dive into the undercount of Texas.
For his part, Director Santos in his written testimony and during the question and answer phase of the hearing, provided a detailed summary of 2020 challenges and shortcomings and the remedies the Bureau was researching to address these and improve the 2030 census. He also addressed the current, comprehensive modernization of internal business practices at the Bureau intended to not only improve data quality but also expand the use of Administrative Records and other means to more efficiently collect data and create improved statistical products.
During the hearing, there was some conflation of the mathematical apportionment process, and suggestions of political bias in the 2020 process during the Trump Administration that oversaw the 2020 Decennial. For the benefit of our readers, we refer to the Census Bureau’s website for this video, The Amazing Apportionment Machine, which illustrates how “Method of Equal Proportions”, a math formula, drives the process.
