Census Estimates U.S. Population As High As 336 Million Ahead Of Actual Count

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Chris Worrell (right) jokes with Teresa Jefferson while applying for a 2020 census job in Boston in February before the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on government records, the Census Bureau estimates that the U.S. population has grown by as much as 8.7% since 2010.

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Blake Nissen/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

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These estimates do not affect each state’s share of congressional seats, Electoral College votes or more than $1.5 trillion a year in federal money for public services.

But in a tumultuous year that saw the constitutionally mandated tally disrupted by the pandemic, historic hurricane and wildfire seasons and last-minute schedule changes by the Trump administration, any indicator of the count’s precision is receiving intense scrutiny from census watchers.

One of the bureau’s most pressing challenges right now is trying to resolve irregularities in this year’s census records, which if left unfixed, could leave millions of people miscounted.

A particular concern among census watchers is whether the bureau has been able to count every resident once, only once, and in the right place, an often repeated goal of the bureau that carries major implications for the redrawing of voting districts, social science and public health research and policymaking that rely on census results.

The answer, however, won’t be found in the bureau’s Demographic Analysis estimates, which only provide a national-level look and do not give breakdowns by state or local community.

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In fact, the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, one of the bureau’s two panels of outside experts focusing on the 2020 census, warned in their recommendations to the agency last month that «the final 2020 Census results may be close to the Demographic Analysis numbers, and still many people could be counted in the wrong place, double counted, or not counted at all.»

The bureau is currently conducting the Post-Enumeration Survey — a sort of mini-census involving fewer than 200,000 households — to determine how the 2020 census may have miscounted the country’s population.

But the first results of that survey, also hindered by COVID-19, are not scheduled for release until November 2021.

In the meantime, a task force assembled by the American Statistical Association — which includes former Census Bureau directors and members of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition agency review team for the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau — has been calling for the bureau to release additional quality indicators about this year’s count.

In response, the bureau announced this month that it’s planning to release more quality metrics and allow independent experts to compare them with the census results in early 2021.

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But exactly when that will happen in the new year remains an open question.

The timing of the results’ release has become entangled with President Trump’s push to make an unprecedented change that would leave unauthorized immigrants out of the numbers used to reallocate the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as votes in the next Electoral College. The Constitution requires the count to include the «whole number of persons in each state.»

The Supreme Court has been reviewing a lower court ruling that has blocked that memo, and despite the administration urging the justices to release a decision soon, the high court did not do so on Monday, its last scheduled day for releasing rulings this year.

After ending counting early, the administration has been pressuring the bureau to shorten the timeline for quality checks in order to try to deliver the first set of census results before the end of Trump’s term on Jan. 20.

But the bureau has been on track to miss the Dec. 31 legal reporting deadline for months, and there’s a chance that by the time it finishes putting together the numbers, Biden will be in the White House.

• 2020 Census
• Census Bureau