HOUSTON - Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan has approved the filing of a lawsuit on behalf of Harris County to stop the federal government from cutting short the time people will have to answer the 2020 U.S. Census.
The complaint was filed in federal court in California on Aug. 18 with Harris County as a plaintiff along with Commissioners Rodney Ellis and Adrian Garcia, the National Urban League, the League of Women Voters, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, King County in Washington State and three California cities—Los Angeles, Salinas and San Jose. They are suing the U.S. Census Bureau, its director and Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.
“This lawsuit challenges the unconstitutional and illegal decision by federal officials to sacrifice the accuracy of the 2020 Census by forcing the Census Bureau to compress eight and a half months of vital data-collection and data-processing into four and a half months,” said County Attorney Ryan. “This decision was made against the judgment of the Bureau’s staff and in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic.”
The lawsuit outlines that the Census Bureau’s staff spent most of the past decade developing an operational plan for the 2020 Census. In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the country, the Census Bureau revised its plan to account for both the difficulties of census-taking during a pandemic and the Bureau’s constitutional and statutory obligation to achieve a fair and accurate count. To achieve both ends, the Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau delayed the counting process, shifted the timeframe for conducting and completing its data-collection operation, and increased the time for conducting data-processing, while, crucially, preserving the same amount of time for each step of those operations.
However, on Aug. 3 the Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau suddenly and without explanation reversed course and replaced the Bureau’s COVID-19 Plan with a new rushed plan that requires the Bureau to complete eight and a half months of data-collection and data-processing in half the time.
The lawsuit points out that this new rushed plan ignores the multi-month delay in census data-collection that the COVID-19 pandemic caused and compels a final date for delivering apportionment data to the President that Bureau officials have repeatedly asserted they cannot meet. And it threatens a massive undercount of the country’s communities of color and the municipalities, cities, counties, and states where they live.
“The federal government’s attempt to rush the census count poses a grave threat to all the vital functions that rely on census data, from reapportioning the United States House of Representatives and redrawing state and local electoral districts to equitably distributing over $1.5 trillion annually in federal funds that support basic needs such as food, health care, and education,” County Attorney Ryan explained. “Undercounted counties and municipalities will lose representation in Congress and tens of millions of dollars in funding and communities of color will lose core political power and vital services.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are local governments, civil rights and civic organizations, and individuals who believe their communities will almost certainly be inaccurately represented and underrepresented in the final census count if the administration succeeds in truncating census data-collection and data-processing. They are asking the court to set aside and stop the implementation of the impossibly-shortened rushed plan, which is based on an unexplained change of position, and allow the Census Bureau to implement the plan that it had designed to fulfill its constitutional duties during the pandemic.
“The federal government’s decision to abandon the COVID-19 plan in favor of the new rushed plan does not satisfy the Supreme Court’s clear command that any decision relating to the census bear a ‘reasonable relationship’ to producing an accurate count,” said County Attorney Ryan. “This decision cannot be justified by any legitimate interest in conducting an accurate census, and in fact will introduce several inaccuracies in the count, chief among them major undercounts of communities of color.”