The bulk of “hard-to-count” counties for the upcoming 2020 census — 251 out of the total of 316 counties that qualify — are in rural America, according to a briefing paper from the Carsey School of Public Policy in New Hampshire. The result could be an undercount of poor rural residents and of minority groups in rural areas, which will affect congressional redistricting and the allocation of federal funds, reports the Daily Yonder.
“There are potential problems that may affect rural areas more than urban areas,” says the Carsey paper, adding that “some groups and some places in rural America will … be very difficult to enumerate accurately.” The group urges that special attention be paid to “blacks in the rural South, Hispanics in the rural Southwest, American Indians on reservations, Alaska Natives, residents of deep Appalachia, [and] migrant and seasonal farmworkers.”
Carsey based its analysis on Census Bureau data about counties with the poorest response rate in the 2010 census. Nearly 17 million people live in hard-to-count counties. As with the overall urban/rural split in the U.S. population, most of the people in hard-to-count counties live in urban areas but the largest number of those counties are rural. A substantial share of hard-to-count counties have populations that are at least 50 percent black, Hispanic, or Native American. “Many of these majority-minority counties are in rural areas,” Carsey says.
The Census Bureau intends to encourage Americans to respond to its questionnaire via the internet. “Yet heavy reliance on the internet in the 2020 Census has important implications for rural areas because there are lower internet access and use rates in rural areas,” says Carsey.
The Carsey paper, “2020 Census Faces Challenges in Rural America,” is available here.