Scare Tactics
Why is the United States Census like the Kobach Commission?
The Voter Service and Polling Center at 5th and Coffman in Longmont was deserted that day in June, 2016, when a young woman with a tear-streaked face came to my desk and announced that she wanted to cancel her voter registration.
I was working as an election judge for the first time. Nobody had ever asked me to un-register them before, but it was clearly important to the person standing before me. I scanned her Driver’s License and retrieved her voter registration record on my laptop screen. I compared the data with the Driver’s License. Everything looked OK.
“Can you confirm your date of birth, please?” I asked.
She did, but looked around uneasily. Her English was accented but clear. “Please just take it out,” she begged. “I am no citizen.” Fresh tears fell.
She’d had no idea that she had been registered to vote when she applied for her Colorado Driver’s License. She found out when she began receiving electioneering materials for the 2016 Primary in the mail. Colorado Law allows non-citizen residents to obtain a driver’s license. Colorado motor-voter law lets citizens register to vote when applying for a license. But a software bug allowed allowed a clerk at the DMV to accidentally register a non-citizen applicant. That was the clerical error that so terrified my young client .
“I have papers,” she whispered. “But if they think I was trying to vote, they will send me home and I will lose my job.”
I thought she would bolt when I had to call the County Elections Office, but removing a record was not something a field judge with 2 weeks of training could do alone. We got the job done over the phone, and I assured her that she wasn’t in trouble. She left the Center in such haste that she almost left her Driver’s License behind.
I thought of that woman when, nearly a year later, the president signed an Executive Order creating the Pence-Kobach “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” It was staffed by some of the most infamous voter-suppression advocates in the Republican Party. In order to keep their personal information out of the expected (and feared) data-sweep, in Colorado alone, a total of 3,738 voters cancelled their registration, surrendering their franchise to fear. The majority of them were Democrats.
The party on the right in the US has historically used sneaky tricks to prevent people whose opinion they didn’t like from voting. After the Civil War, it was Democrats who did this, with poll taxes, literacy tests, and other unethical means of skinning people of color out of their right to vote. Since then, the parties have changed places, and it is now Republicans who engage in voter suppression. Their techniques are more subtle: too few polling places in certain neighborhoods, shortened voting hours, and voter ID laws. All intend to prevent citizens who are not members of the [white] monied establishment from voting. All these tricks, from literacy tests to Kobach’s Commission, incorporate a healthy dose of Fear.
In-person voter fraud is a myth. Trump disbanded the Kobach Commission with no outcome in January 2018. Citizens, don’t fear to register and vote.
Stand Up and Be Counted
The Constitution of the United States mandates a census every ten years. It says that the number of persons — specifically, not “citizens” —residing in the United States shall be counted.
The Obama administration believed an accurate count of the population of the United States was critical for a fair electoral process and fairly allocating government funds to states and municipalities. So it designed a census form that was short, simple and non-threatening. It waged a campaign of education designed to make people comfortable with the census. Above left is a 2010 poster aimed at Hispanic families. With the Bush-era wars still in full swing, and post 911 prejudices strong, there was similar messaging for Muslim families.
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
The best interest of every state and municipality is served when its full population is counted. But, if the Federal government is not an honest broker in conducting the census, then it may use the census for a political agenda. It may remain within the letter of the law, but slant its messaging to affect the response rates of certain populations.
The Trump administration has proven than it favors groups who vote Republican over those who vote Democratic. It favors affluent populations over poor ones. It favors white populations over diverse ones. And it scapegoats immigrants, documented or not.
The signs point to this Census Bureau using every available means to under-count populations that don’t support this administration. They will use tricks familiar from voter suppression: access restrictions and intimidation. Worse, other departments in the government are already meddling with the content of the census.
Restricting Access to the Census
This text from 2020 Census Bureau Operation Plan (v. 3.0) describes how the internet is expected to be the primary means of answering the census:
A primary objective of the 2020 Census is for a majority of respondents to complete their census questionnaire online. Communication of this objective to individual households is the purpose of the Census Bureau’s mail contact strategies. The Census Bureau is looking to develop a contact approach that produces an “actionable” response on the part of the respondent. One approach, termed “Internet First,” has been developed to encourage respondents to use the Internet. Currently, this model includes the mailing of a letter inviting respondents to complete the questionnaire online, two follow-up reminders and, if necessary, a mailed paper questionnaire followed by a final reminder.
This approach favors educated and affluent households over other demographics including low-income families, rural households, and the elderly. While the Operational Plan goes on to explain how areas “known” to have limited access to the internet will have paper questionnaires mailed earlier in the process, any such targeting will be approximate, and the response rate for these disadvantaged groups will drop. Who is the judge of who gets a paper questionnaire and who doesn’t? The emphasis on Internet responses in the census is a big deal for Colorado, with its large, poor rural populations where broadband is expensive or nonexistent.
Intimidation and Question 8
One new question which is planned for the 2020 census is a bigger deal. The question is being added at the request of DACA-killer Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Just how big a deal this is for the Fourth Congressional District can be seen from the table at left. A fifth of Coloradans and a fifth of CD4 residents identify as Hispanic. We don’t know what percentage of our Hispanic population is undocumented. But with Trump beating his anti-immigrant drum since opening his campaign, and with the games he’s been playing with the DACA registrants, Colorado’s undocumented population, mainly people from Mexico and South America, live in fear of deportation.
Question 8 is expected to cause a lot of people who identify as Hispanic to shun the census, whether they are citizens or not, and whether their presence is authorized or not.
There will be legal challenges to Question 8. The Attorneys General of eighteen states and the District of Columbia, and Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, have already sent a joint letter to the Secretary of Commerce urging him to drop Question 8. The letter runs to 12 pages and cites dozens of case-law references, but the letter’s final paragraph summarizes it:
Fair, proportionate electoral representation in our democracy depends on valid Census data. The proposal to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census questionnaire would defeat that goal, violate the Constitution, and undermine the purposes of the Voting Rights Act that the Justice Department claims it wants to protect. Because inclusion of a citizenship question would threaten the Census Bureau’s ability to conduct its constitutionally mandated role, and would be arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act — causing significant, direct harm to our states and residents — we urge you to reject the Justice Department’s request.
The “significant, direct harm” that an under-count would cause includes loss of fair democratic representation for Colorado — which stands to gain one or two Congressional districts in the upcoming reapportionment if its population is accurately counted.
In addition, John Thompson, Census Bureau Director until May of 2018, recently (February 27, 2018) said: “There are great risks that including this question, particularly in the atmosphere that we’re in today, will result in an undercount, not just of non-citizen populations but other populations that are concerned with what could happen to them. That is a tremendous risk…Putting that [citizenship] question on the decennial census has the risk of raising fears among certain populations that it would be very hard for the Census Bureau to countermand.”
Thompson did offer an additional safeguard. He reminded us that Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says that “the actual Enumeration” is the responsibility of Congress, to be implemented “in such as they shall by Law direct.
That means that the new Congress elected in 2018 will have the ultimate responsibility for the 2020 Census. One of the most important reasons to Win the Fourth this year is to unseat Ken Buck to help Democrats take over the House. Do you really want Ken Buck voting on the validity of the 2020 Census?
Don’t Rely on What I Say
I am writing this opinion from the safe harbor of citizenship, white privilege, and affluence. If I were a non-citizen, documented or not, I don’t know what I’d do. If you are reading this and you are an undocumented Colorado resident, I respect your decision. I am going to summarize some facts below. Then I am going to tell you what I plan to do. And that’s all I’ve got. You must decide where your best interest lies.
The Facts
The law protects the anonymity of the census data. The full census data may not be released to the public until 72 years have passed. (The personal census roster from 1940 was released in 2012.) In two hundred and forty years this public trust has never been violated.
Secret abuses have occurred. During WWI the census data was used to identify draft-dodgers. And later, it was used to prosecute employers for violating child labor laws. It might be said that this was a beneficial use, but it was still unlawful.
A fine can be levied for not responding to the census. The statutory fine is $100 for not responding, and $500 for lying. Legislation from the 1980’s allows a judge to impose a penalty of up to $5000 for any misdemeanor. The last time anyone was prosecuted for avoiding the Census was in 1970, under the Nixon administration. That was also the last time the Census contained a question about citizenship.
The Other Facts
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, Colorado meets the criteria for a Sanctuary State. Fifteen of our cities and counties are additionally listed as Sanctuary jurisdictions, whether they use the word or not. These places actively shelter their law-abiding undocumented families from being ndeported. We recognize the value, the rights, and the humanity of people who live and work in our communities, however they came to be here.
As The Weekly Weathervane has reported before, Colorado has a 3% jobless rate and an estimated 60,000 unfilled jobs. We need every able-bodied resident of Colorado to fill these jobs.
Data from the Decennial Census is used to allocate federal funding to states and cities. It is used to assign seats in Congress to the states and apportion the Congressional districts. When residents fear to respond to the Census, we stand to lose power and money we need to protect and care for our people.
WTF Colorado’s Pledge to You
Not just this reporter, but WTF Colorado as an organization, strongly believe this is a deliberate strategy born of prejudice and cold political calculation. We believe it is our duty to oppose it and minimize the harm it does.
As activists and elected officials, we have some power to affect what our city and congressional district does with regard to the Census and its immigrant residents. We pledge to use our influence to ensure that each household has the means to be counted, and the understanding of what being counted means to each, both the certain good and the possible risk. We will continue to promote and reinforce policies that welcome, affirm, and protect the people who live here, no matter who they are or how they came to be here.
WTF knows that we are all Americans. We want everyone to be Fearless. Today, we must be fearless because we are principled and brave. But ultimately we will be fearless because, once more, we have nothing to fear.
The author is a member of the Longmont, Colorado City Council. Her opinions are her own (and WTF’s) and do not represent the position of the City of Longmont. But this pledge, passed by Longmont in December 2016, does represent the position of the city.
To learn more about this subject, WTF Colorado recommends this article in The Atlantic.
