under the radar
Digitizing the 2020 Census

The 2020 Census will be the first to be completed largely online - if the Census Bureau's plan goes off without complications. An online census is one of several technological innovations that the Census Bureau has designed to respond to the challenges of counting an increasingly large and diverse society, while also complying with strict cost constraints that Congress has imposed.

data collection -> sampling error forthcoming

Under the Bureau's plans for 2020's online census, 80 percent of households will receive an invitation to submit their responses over the internet. The Bureau estimates that 45 percent of those households will respond to the census online. The Bureau will mail paper questionnaires to the remaining 20 percent of households, targeting those with low internet access or large older-adult populations. Questionnaires will also be mailed to those households that do not respond online in the first instance.

"undercounted" [sic], "overcounted" [sic], and "hard-to-count" [wtf]: Wealthy populations may be overcounted because some families own a second home

the move to an online system faces another hurdle that the Census Bureau must overcome: the difficulties many traditionally undercounted communities face accessing the internet. Racial and ethnic minorities, urban and rural low-income households, immigrants, and young children have been historically undercounted at disproportionately high rates.

wut: "The United States has grown more diverse in the past decade and has more renters."

Transitioning to an online platform could lead them to being undercounted even more severely. Some rural areas lack broadband or any internet service. People with lower incomes are less likely to have a smart phone or internet at home.

data validation forthcoming

In addition to encouraging people to respond online, the Bureau is also considering using administrative records - data that people have already given to the federal government for purposes like tax returns, government assistance programs, and the like - to reduce the need [!] for door-to-door visits to households occupied housing and help improve the quality of the data that it collects. The Bureau estimated that using administrative records in these ways could save it $900 million.

Alrighty then. This exercise in statistical description is a farce. The US "citizen question" is now officially dead to me. Do we actually need a census? US gov has gone full 2011 UK Census

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.