by Terri Ann Lowenthal
As the nation’s largest domestic activity, which just happens to be rife with political consequences, the census naturally attracts unending commentary across the vast blogosphere and online media sites, much of it by folks who clearly know little about this complex undertaking but have something to say about it anyway. I keep a file of articles with quotes or messages that strike me as somewhat ridiculous. When concentrating on real work became difficult during last week’s heat wave, I pulled out the file to see if I could wrap my head around some of the odder census reporting of 2010.
Here’s a headline from a recent posting on The Market Financial (7/1/10): “Officials Say Obama’s Census Workers Forged Surveys.” Wow! There were 600,000 temporary census takers making door-to-door visits at the height of field operations. The president — despite having to worry about two wars, an environmental disaster on the Gulf Coast, and a stubborn recession — personally made sure there were two rogue enumerators who would fabricate census responses in the district of the Census Bureau’s oversight committee chairman. Glad to know someone is still working to uncover high-level political interference with the census! But really, I am grateful that the president is paying attention to the 2010 count, even if his hires in this case turned out to be duds.
The role of census hiring in the president’s economic recovery plan was ripe for ping-pong press release demagoguery. When the employment picture brightened in April and May, Republicans wagged their collective finger at the president, accusing him of padding job creation claims with census hiring. When job figures plummeted in June, reflecting the end (on schedule!) of the labor-intensive door-to-door follow-up operation, conservatives railed against the president’s failed economic policies. Let me get this straight: The president can’t take credit for jobs created by the census but he is responsible for losing those jobs? Whatever.
Just ran across an interview on Federal News Radio (7/12/10) with a senior Microsoft executive, who explained how the tech company teamed up with Florida to offer a “cloud” solution to tracking the progress of the census in the state. I visited MyFloridaCensus.gov, which asked residents to report if they were counted or not and then tracked responses (yes or no) on a map. (Isn’t this what survey researchers call a self-selecting poll? Can’t imagine this effort was very thorough, though I give the state credit for trying to promote an accurate count.) All of this was made possible by a “cloud,” for which
Microsoft provided software, infrastructure and a platform named Azure, with the goal of “enhancing the efforts around ensuring that they had a complete count of residents during the 2010 census.” I must be getting old, because I thought the census was complicated enough without throwing clouds into the picture. Sigh…
Is that rain I hear? Hopefully the steamy weather will break, and I’ll be back to writing about important census issues next week. At least Congress had the sense to move Census Day to April in the early 1900s; otherwise, those census takers would be going door to door in the sweltering heat of July and August (the first census started on August 1; Census Day was later moved to June 1 for many decades) and more would probably throw in the towel and start fabricating responses on their computers in air conditioned Local Census Offices.
Categories: Politics & Census 2010
Tagged: 2010 Decennial, Terri Ann Lowenthal, census, Census & Politics, Census Day, census boycott
by Terri Ann Lowenthal
You’ve probably heard the saying that making laws is a lot like making sausage: The process isn’t pretty and involves a lot of steps you’d probably rather not know about, so you should focus instead on the end result.
The decennial census isn’t quite that bad. Most of the procedures, while extraordinarily difficult, are relatively straightforward and transparent. Yes, there are steps that raise eyebrows among head count purists, but even the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned less-direct methods such as statistical imputation to round out the count. Yes, there are missteps in all of the operations, such as enumerators who don’t follow the rules for asking about race or skip some of the required six household contacts in favor of fabricating answers, or supervisors who press their crews to rush through assignments to stay within budget. These problems deserve close scrutiny but are hardly a reason to condemn an entire enterprise where most of the million-plus temporary workers do their jobs well.
The better analogy might be sending a man to the moon. The complexity is mind-boggling. There are finite windows of time for each major component of the journey and unending checklists of specific steps and operations that the agency must implement and complete in a specific order, lest the whole house of cards collapses.
In our little analogy, the astronauts have already landed on the moon and collected their samples, but now they have to get back home, deploying a series of no less critical and complex steps to complete the mission. In the census, visits to initially unresponsive homes are all but done, and the Census Bureau is moving to the Coverage Improvement phase. This is when census workers — by phone and in person — take steps to reduce the possibility that the census will overlook entire housing units or people within enumerated households. (See the Census Project Blog of June 29, 2010, for more information on how the census misses people.)
Here are the current steps that will help bring the census in for a smooth landing at year’s end:
- The largest coverage improvement operation is the dryly-named Vacant-Delete Check. Census workers will revisit about 8.5 million housing units that enumerators identified as vacant or nonexistent, to verify the status. They will not return to addresses from which the Postal Service returned a questionnaire as undeliverable and which an enumerator later marked as vacant, given the preponderance of evidence that the home was not occupied on April 1. The Vacant-Delete operation also will include a relatively small number of cases that were added to the census universe late in the process — such as newly constructed homes, and addresses that local governments successfully argued should have been on the master list — as well as households whose mailed questionnaire did not contain a minimum amount of required information (number of residents plus two other answers).
- Coverage Follow-up continues to about 7.5 million homes, with calls to large households (more than six people, or more than eight in the bilingual questionnaire universe) to collect complete information for all residents; to homes for which a questionnaire contained a count discrepancy — that is, the number of people reported did not match (high or low) the number of people for which information was provided; and to most (but not all) households whose form indicated that they included a resident who also lives somewhere else, such as a college student (potential over count), or excluded a person who is a part-time resident (potential undercount).
- The Field Verification operation, scheduled for late summer, generally does not involve personal contact with households but is designed to help reduce housing unit duplications. Census workers will verify the existence of addresses reported on Be Counted forms (which didn’t have a geographic barcode) and through telephone response.
There are other procedures to verify and improve the accuracy of the census that do not involve fieldwork. The Census Bureau will do a nationwide matching process in an effort to ensure people are counted only once and in the right place. It also uses a limited set of administrative records, including social security, IRS, and probationer/parolee information, to spot possible omissions, especially among historically hard-to-count population subgroups. Finally, the Census Bureau checks a percentage of every enumerator’s work by re-interviewing household residents, to evaluate the quality of the information gathered and also to spot patterns of potential fabrication.
Inevitably, some people who cooperated by mailing in their form or by opening their door to an enumerator will be annoyed when the Census Bureau calls or knocks again. We can’t do much more than give these beleaguered Americans a gold star; quality assurance is an essential part of any respectable — and successful — enterprise.
Categories: Census Operations
Tagged: 2010 Decennial, Census Bureau, Terri Ann Lowenthal, Complete Count, census, undercount, NRFU, Census Operations, overcount, Be Counted forms, Vacant-Delete Check, Coverage Improvement, Coverage Follow-up, Field Verification
by Terri Ann Lowenthal
Census Director Robert Groves announced yesterday that his army of enumerators had completed 99.6 percent of visits to households that didn’t mail back their census forms. That means the Nonresponse Follow-up (NRFU) operation will wrap up by the scheduled July 10 end date — earlier in most places.
Good news, right? Maybe Americans were in a cooperative mood, at least after missing their first chance to mail back a form. Maybe the neighbors or landlords of unresponsive people felt sorry for frustrated enumerators and cheerfully offered basic information about their recalcitrant fellow residents. Maybe sworn translators or cultural facilitators successfully helped bridge the communications gap with families who spoke a different language than, or didn’t trust, the census takers.
When NRFU comes to an official close, census workers will have successfully counted residents in ALL of the housing units on their assignment lists (or determined that an address was unoccupied or didn’t exist). Looking back, we have: Seventy-two percent of households counted by mail. A few million more counted only in person through the Update/Enumerate operation. Forty-seven million initially unresponsive homes counted door-to-door. Plus group living facilities (e.g. college dorms, military barracks, prisons), homeless people (Service-based Enumeration) and people who are transient (e.g. carnival workers, migrant farm workers, RV park residents). It all adds up to 100 percent of the census universe.
So why, a census advocate in the Gulf Coast asked thoughtfully during a meeting last week, is there an undercount?
Logical question. There are two primary categories of “misses” — called “omissions” in statistical parlance — that account for the estimated undercount in the census. The first, “whole household omissions,” occurs when the Census Bureau misses an entire housing unit and, therefore, its residents, be they one or more unrelated individuals or a family. This can happen for several reasons, including:
- Pre-census address canvassing was not as thorough as it should have been, addresses were overlooked, and the residents of that housing unit did not receive a questionnaire or a visit from an enumerator and did not take steps on their own to be counted (such as filling out a Be Counted form or providing their information via the toll-free assistance lines).
- Address listers, enumerators and local officials reviewing address lists all fail to spot a “hidden” housing unit, such as an illegally converted basement apartment that houses a separate family but doesn’t have its own mailing address, a subdivided tenement with a difficult-to-spot entry on the second floor in the back, or a garage that is someone’s home.
The second category — arguably more difficult to overcome because the solutions are largely outside the Census Bureau’s control — is “within household omissions.” In this scenario, a housing unit is counted but one or more people in the household are missed. For example:
- A large household fills out information for six people (the maximum number for which full data are collected on the questionnaire; the Spanish-language form offered space for eight people), but doesn’t bother to list additional people on the roster, usually leaving off the youngest household members.
- Families forget to list infants; divorced or unmarried parents who share custody of their children assume the other parent has counted their offspring.
- A 20-something unmarried man does not have strong ties to a single household; sometimes he stays with his girlfriend, sometimes he sleeps at a friend’s home and sometimes he crashes at his mother’s home. The Census Bureau managed to get completed forms from all of these addresses, but none of the respondents thought to include our young friend as a member of their household.
These examples alone show why there is a disproportionately high undercount of young children and men — especially men of color — between the ages of 18 and 49. There are many more reasons why people aren’t counted; furthermore, some people are counted in the wrong place due to miscoding of an address, which can affect the accuracy of census data for small areas although not necessarily for larger levels of geography.
Which type of omission accounts for more of the estimated gross undercount? In its exhaustive review of the 2000 census, a National Academy of Sciences expert panel concluded that we don’t really know whether mistakes in the master address list contributed more or less to census mistakes (error) than the failure to enumerate people in households that the Census Bureau counted. I hope that evaluations of the 2010 census will provide a more definitive answer to this question, to help inform continued refinement of the Master Address File, development of an effective communications campaign, and other key components of the next decennial count.
For now, even though door-to-door visits are winding down, there is still time to reduce both whole and within-household misses. If you didn’t get a census form and no one knocked on your door, call the toll-free assistance lines and provide information for everyone who lives at your address. (The English and in-language numbers are posted at http://2010.census.gov/2010census/contact/index.php.) If you answered the census but now realize you didn’t include everyone who was a member of your household on April 1 and was unlikely to be counted elsewhere, call the same number and report the additional people (or encourage the missed person to call). You have until July 30 to make sure everyone who matters in your life counts!
Categories: Complete Count
Tagged: 2010 Decennial, Census Bureau, Terri Ann Lowenthal, Outreach, Complete Count, census, Dr. Robert Groves, undercount, NRFU, Census Operations, Be Counted forms
by Terri Ann Lowenthal
In a few weeks, the massive, labor-intensive phase of the 2010 census known as Nonresponse Follow-up (NRFU) will come to an end. Census takers will have visited 48 million addresses that did not return a questionnaire by mail. (Enumerators also went door-to-door in selected areas, such as American Indian reservations and the Rio Grande Valley Colonias, that did not receive forms by mail or hand because of difficult-to-reach housing or nontraditional addressing.)
The Census Bureau wanted to build a megaphone of national and community “partners” to convey and amplify a simple message: The census is important, safe, and easy; your community benefits it you are counted. Census managers — career civil servants all, save a handful of political appointees — were confident that a 2000 Census partnership program (the maiden voyage) on steroids would help them overcome significant barriers to a complete count at a time of growing cultural and linguistic diversity, economic dislocation, anti-government sentiment, and an increasingly hostile environment for immigrants in some states. Three thousand partnership liaisons befriended local governments and grassroots organizations, providing fact sheets and fliers, posters and promotional items, to help these champions of an accurate census serve as the government’s voice in their respective communities.
But community-based census advocates wanted to do more than carry the message and then stand back. They wanted to get into the operational trenches and procedural weeds, to explain the process to their constituents and neighbors and to mobilize historically hard-to-count communities to participate, using their “trusted voices” to explain, convince, cajole, and ultimately empower large numbers of people who otherwise might not be counted. To do that, they needed more information and a deeper understanding of the process than most partnership specialists were trained to provide.
I think the Partnership Program created expectations that put Census Bureau staff and local partners in different orbits. The Census Bureau was in a tight circle: “This is what you can do for us.” Community groups envisioned a far more inclusive and collaborative approach. As the census got underway, frustration mounted for some partners with the resources to implement their own parallel promotion campaigns. They had first-hand local knowledge that they believed could help the Census Bureau ensure coverage of people most at risk of being missed. The Census Bureau had a tightly scripted operational plan that, regional and local officials believed, left little room for unplanned maneuvers and outside reinforcement.
I think that Dr. Groves, who has been on the job less than a year, understands this gap in expectations and communication. He has met personally with community advocates engaged in census promotion, including in the Gulf Coast region and the Rio Grande Valley, where the Census Bureau faces enormous challenges of language barriers, mobility, and widespread (and understandable) mistrust of government — especially of federal agencies whose well-meaning and experienced staff are nevertheless far removed from unique conditions and dynamics in America’s diverse communities — among people struggling mightily to overcome poverty and unequal access to resources.
Congress should move quickly after census operations wrap-up to review “lessons learned” from the 2010 count with respect to the role of partners and how the Census Bureau can bring community groups into the planning and development process more effectively for the next census. One suggestion is for the Census Bureau to partner with foundations to ensure that regional and local organizations are well-informed about census research and planning throughout the decade, an approach that could bring public and private resources to bear in support of an important (constitutionally required) national mission, which could ease the potential for misunderstanding and help ensure constructive collaboration during census implementation. I also urge Congress and the Bureau to consider a role for community organization representatives in reviewing the Master Address File under the Local Update of Census Addresses program, whose provisions for confidential review of preliminary address lists currently cover only state and local officials.
These and other ideas will require thoughtful and careful solutions that are best discussed in the less harried early years of the census planning process, instead of in the heat of the battle as the next enumeration approaches and the battle plan is drawn.
Categories: Partnerships
Tagged: 2010 Decennial, Census Bureau, Terri Ann Lowenthal, challenges, Partnerships, Outreach, Complete Count, census, Dr. Robert Groves, undercount, Latinos & the Census, NRFU
by Phil Sparks 
Over the past several years leading up to the taking of Census 2010, there were a number of setbacks for both the funding and the taking of the current decennial census. No presidential administration or Congress pays much attention to decennial census funding, which runs into the billions of dollars, until the final few years of each decade. Until then, it’s an uphill fight by the Census Bureau to secure operational funding on the 10-year cycle needed to finance and plan each decennial census.
This time around there were budget fights with both the Bush Administration and Congress. Further, a huge miscalculation by the Bureau itself over the proposed use of handheld computers for Census 2010 cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Infighting between the Census Bureau and its supervisor – the Department of Commerce – didn’t help matters.
Now, Congress is considering the Census Oversight, Efficiency and Management Reform Act of 2010. Introduced on a bipartisan basis and already approved by a key Senate committee, the proposed act would make the Census Bureau director more independent by having her/him report directly to the Secretary of Commerce and fixing a term limit of five years, with the 10-year decennial planning cycle split into two five-year phases. Further, the yearly budget proposal of the Bureau sent to Congress as well as congressional testimony would not have to be “cleared” first by the Department of Commerce as it is submitted.
Seven former Census Bureau directors, both Republicans and Democrats, endorsed the proposed legislation. Each has their own story to tell Congress about the infighting that occurred during their term of office. The former directors’ statement endorsing the Act states that “we strongly believe that the time has come for the Census Bureau to be much more independent and transparent.” Well said! Now it is up to Congress to act.
Categories: Census Operations · Congressional Oversight
Tagged: 2010 Decennial, census, Census & Politics, Census 2020, Census Bureau, Census Operations, challenges, Commerce Department, Congress, Congressional Oversight, Dr. Robert Groves, Phil Sparks
by Terri Ann Lowenthal
It’s the sixth week of the massive Nonresponse Follow-up (NRFU) operation and enumerators have now completed about four-fifths (80%) of their visits to households that didn’t mail back a questionnaire earlier in the decennial counting process. The steady progress is encouraging, although it’s important to remember that the speed gauge will plunge to a virtual crawl as census takers try over and over to wrest information from the truly unwilling.
Census advocates are focusing their final outreach efforts on communities that research has shown are most at risk of an undercount. While many hard-to-count neighborhoods showed marked improvement in mail response over Census 2000, thanks in large part to the work of trusted national and grassroots organizations, participation rates still lagged well below the national average of 72 percent in some areas. That means enumerators have to visit a far larger number of households and most likely have to make many more visits and phone calls to collect information. Over the remaining four weeks of NRFU, the Census Bureau and stakeholders who care about an accurate count must zero-in on what I call the “hardest of the hard-to-count” in an all-out effort to reduce the historic, persistent disproportionate undercount of people of color, immigrants, the poor, and young children.
But not everyone shares my concern. Conservative census-watchers want to be sure the public hasn’t forgotten what a huge boondoggle and invasion of privacy this constitutionally mandated decennial counting exercise really is.
So there was former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) (a lawyer!), warning in his Atlanta Journal-Constitution column last week that census takers (not to mention the Secretary of Commerce!) can enter your apartment when you’re not home. Mr. Barr’s interpretation of the Census Act demonstrated all the skill of a … ummm … first year law student.
Show of hands: How many of you really think there is a law on the books that allows census workers to “demand access” to your unit when you aren’t there? I mean, even the FBI can’t bust into your home without a warrant. The Census Bureau’s far less intriguing mission is to find out how many people are in your household and learn a few basic demographic facts about them. What are enumerators supposed to do if you aren’t home: Count the number of toothbrushes in the bathroom? Estimate the number of children if there’s a rubber ducky in the tub? Mark down “female” if they find mascara on the counter?
Yes, there’s a provision of the Census Act (13 U.S.C. §223) that requires owners and managers of multi-unit buildings (e.g. apartments, boarding houses … the law even says “tenements,” which should tell you something about the time period in which it was enacted) to give census takers access to the property, so they can knock on individual doors, or to assist with a count of residents if the building is what we now call a “group quarter” facility. Without this provision, the Census Bureau might never be able to follow-up with the millions of households in “doorman” buildings, gated communities, and other locked high-rises that don’t bother to mail back their census forms (or respond to other Census Bureau surveys). But, hey, it’s far easier to make up stuff that is sure to stoke a few anti-government flames than to engage in a thoughtful discussion about how to meet the nation’s information needs without placing an undue burden on the public.
Then up popped James O’Keefe of ACORN videotape fame, explaining to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America (June 1, 2010) that he signed up to be a census taker in New Jersey in order to “expose the truth and stand up to power.” Mr. O’Keefe, who I think just wants his 15 minutes of fame without doing any of the hard work necessary to actually accomplish anything, secretly taped his training supervisor purportedly telling him not to worry about claiming a few extra hours on his time sheet that he didn’t actually work. “This is about destroying corruption,” the self-proclaimed “conservative activist out to create chaos for glory” said solemnly. Admirable goal, Mr. O’Keefe, and it’s a good thing you need not look any farther than a mirror because it sounds to me like you just ripped off the taxpayers in getting paid to train for a job you could never do because you recently pled guilty to a crime (unlawfully entering the Baton Rouge office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-LA).
And then there was Rep. Michele (“Just the number of people, ma’am.”) Bachmann (R-MN) in a debate with the Minnesota State Demographer, telling constituents that the census has “morphed into [a] justification for big government” (Stillwater Gazette, Stillwater, MN, 5/22/10). The Legislative Branch member conveniently forgot to mention that Congress required the collection of all of the data in the census and American Community Survey for the implementation and oversight of federal programs.
Yes, for some, distracting the nation’s attention from the growing challenges of taking an accurate census every ten years appears to be the primary goal, either in hopes of undermining the credibility of the results or scaring away enough people to ensure political advantage for their followers. For the rest of us, it’s eyes on the prize: There’s still time to convince the uncounted that it’s not too late to beat the cynics at their own game, by making sure everyone in America counts.
Categories: Census Operations · Public Opinion
Tagged: Terri Ann Lowenthal, Public Opinion, challenges, census, NRFU, Census Operations
by Terri Ann Lowenthal
Two months ago, excitement over the 2010 census was at its peak. Daily news coverage. Round the clock (or so it seemed) advertisements. NASCAR teams, the NCAA and NFL, and Dora the Explorer all got in on the act. Mayors, ministers, civic leaders, entertainers, athletes, all imploring their constituents and fans to be counted. Late afternoon “participation rate” updates, for which the aforementioned census acolytes waited with baited breath and then resumed their canvassing, phone banking, press releases, block parties and assistance forums with renewed purpose and eyes on ever-higher mail-back percentages.
Now another month has passed and the 2010 census has settled into a rhythm much farther below the radar. Hundreds of thousands of census takers continue to walk city blocks and drive down rural roads in an effort to track down households that didn’t respond in the first phase of the count. Door knocking continues on American Indian reservations, in the Rio Grande Valley Colonias, and in other remote areas where unique housing patterns required only in-person data collection (Update/Enumerate areas).
Census Director Groves reported that, as of late last week, census takers had completed 62 percent of Nonresponse Follow-up (NRFU) cases nationally. That sounds like reasonable progress a month after the Bureau mobilized its field troops, with six weeks left to go until the operation wraps up on July 10. (The director will give another update at a press briefing tomorrow.) But we need to know more about how well the count is advancing at the local level and whether there are signs that housing unit coverage might not translate to an accurate count in all communities.
Mail-back rates varied significantly across the country, meaning the scope of effort needed to achieve a complete count in each community differs markedly. In areas that met or exceeded the national participation rate of 72 percent, for example, there might be only 10 percent of addresses remaining if one applies the national rate of completion. In other communities, the second phase dwarfs the first, not simply because low mail response has left a greater proportion of homes for enumerators to visit but because these households are, by definition, harder to count. For whatever reason, they didn’t mail back their questionnaires. Concerns about confidentiality? Skepticism about the benefits of being counted? Language or literacy barriers? Maybe their census form never arrived (by mail or by hand). The Census Bureau must overcome all of these challenges, while striving to ensure that the universe of homes to be counted was thorough to start.
Random press reports shed additional light on the progress at ground level. Census takers are wrapping up their door-to-door visits soon in Salt Lake City, according to regional officials. Enumerators have collected information through personal interviews from 98 percent of homes in the Texas Colonias. That’s encouraging news for local advocates who have worked tirelessly to promote participation in the Rio Grande Valley.
But advocates in most hard-to-count communities would benefit from more systemic, localized measures of progress, in order to tailor messages and target increasingly limited resources to neighborhoods where census takers have not made contact with a high percentage of households. And even when the “completion” rate closes in on the magical 100 percent, we don’t know whether the coverage of the population matches that achievement. Evaluations of recent censuses show, in fact, that as many as half of the people missed in the census live in households that were otherwise counted. Several demographic subgroups are especially vulnerable to the within-household omission problem — infants and young children; young, single males lacking strong ties to one household; families displaced from another home — characteristics primarily associated with hard-to-count communities and higher rates of undercounting in the census. It will take more than standard ads urging cooperation with census takers to identify these potential gaps in the count and urge people who believe they were missed to call-in their answers by July 30 through the Telephone Questionnaire Assistance lines.
The initial excitement may have worn off, but it’s far too early to be suffering from “census withdrawal.” There’s a long way to go, and we have to commit our energy and focus for the long haul. There will be time to exhale when we are confident everything has been done to assure fair and universal coverage in every community, no matter its “hard to count” history.
Categories: Census Operations · Census Outreach Efforts
Tagged: 2010 Decennial, Census Bureau, Terri Ann Lowenthal, challenges, Outreach, Complete Count, census, NRFU, Census Operations, mail response
by Terri Ann Lowenthal
My cell phone rang at 9:28 a.m. on May 20. I didn’t recognize the incoming phone number but, thinking a community organization might be calling with a census question, I answered it. I immediately realized it was a recording and was about to hit Disconnect when I heard, “… the 2010 census is taking place …” — in that instant, I thought an advocacy group was doing robo-calls to urge cooperation with census takers — but then I heard something directly to this effect: “… but the census is not collecting information about the incidence of diabetes or other diseases.” The recording told me to press 1 if anyone in my household or I had diabetes, or to press 2 if this didn’t apply to me. Realizing there might be a scam involved, I pressed 1 and grabbed a pen and notepad.
A pleasant woman came on the phone and rattled off the name of a company, saying they were doing a survey. I asked her to repeat the name of her organization. “Diabetic Experts,” she said, going on to describe the outfit as a nonprofit (she emphasized that several times during the call) working to ensure adequate funding for diabetes research. Do you have diabetes, she asked? No, I said, adding vaguely that someone in my household might, in an effort to keep her talking. “I thought the call had something to do with the 2010 census,” I prompted.
The caller didn’t miss a beat. I wasn’t able to record the conversation, of course, but here is the exact gist of it. The census is going on, she said, clearly reading from a script, but “they” (referring back to whomever is taking the census!) aren’t collecting information on people who have diabetes. Diabetic Experts was conducting a survey to determine “health care funding by ZIP code.” I tried to sound as earnestly interested as I could: “So you are taking this survey for the government?” “Well,” she said (not “no”), “since they don’t ask questions about health, ‘they’ve asked us’ to collect this information.” That’s right, the caller specifically said that the government had asked them to do this survey, and clearly implied that it was somehow related to the census, which was not covering this topic. It was important to find out more about health care funding in my community, I was told. “Oh,” I pressed on casually, “so the Census Bureau asked you to do this survey.” “Yes, we’re a nonprofit (she said yet again), and…”; she nicely repeated a similar spiel about their commitment to ensuring adequate funding for diabetes treatment.
“So, does anyone in your household have diabetes?” the caller finally asked me again. “No,” I admitted, “I thought you were calling about the 2010 census; that’s what the recording said when I answered the phone.” At that point, the woman said she was sorry to bother me and that she would take me “off the call list.”
Earlier this year, after the Republican National Committee and several issue advocacy groups sent out fundraising appeals widely criticized for featuring misleading references to the census, Congress required greater transparency for mailings that display the word “Census” (P.L. 111-155, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY). Even census subcommittee member Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) — whom I’ve taken to task in this blog for what I believe were several misguided criticisms of the Census Bureau — commendably chastised his party’s organization for deceptive mailings that were “over the line.” When the RNC kept up the mailings with an artfully modified envelope, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), senior Republican on the bureau’s authorizing committee, took the lead in quickly closing the apparent loophole in the original law (H.R. 5148, sent to the president for signature).
How about a law banning telephone solicitations or surveys that mislead the public into thinking the information gathering is related to the decennial census? A Google search of “Diabetic Experts” turned up nearly two million entries, including a “diabeticexperts.org” website that requires a user name and password. Here’s the phone number that showed up on my cell phone: 803-445-5261. Anyone on the Hill or in the press corps want to take a stab at tracking down this disgraceful scam?
Categories: Census Operations
Tagged: 2010 Decennial, Census Bureau, Terri Ann Lowenthal, challenges, census, privacy, Congressional Oversight, Census Operations, Diabetic Experts, census scams
