10 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
Like most institutions of democratic government, the census is under threat.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
BUT WHO’S COUNTING?
The coming census.
BY JILLLEPORE
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM PEACOCK
“
C
ount all people, including ba-
bies,” the U.S. Census Bureau
instructs Americans on the question-
naire that will be mailed to every house-
hold by April 1, 2020, April Fool’s Day,
which also happens to be National Cen-
sus Day (and has been since 1930). You
can answer the door; you can answer
by mail; for the first time, you can an-
swer online.
People have been counting people
for thousands of years. Count every-
one, beginning with babies who have
teeth, decreed census-takers in China
in the first millennium B.C.E., under
the Zhou dynasty. “Take ye the sum of
all the congregation of the children of
Israel, after their families, by the house
of their fathers, with the number of
their names, every male by their polls,”
God commands Moses in the Book of
Numbers, describing a census, taken
around 1500 B.C.E., that counted only
men “twenty years old and upward, all
that are able to go forth to war in Is-
rael”—that is, potential conscripts.
Ancient rulers took censuses to mea-
sure and gather their strength: to mus-
ter armies and levy taxes. Who got
counted depended on the purpose of the
census. In the United States, which
counts “the whole number of persons in
each state,” the chief purpose of the cen-
sus is to apportion representation in Con-
gress. In 2018, Secretary of Commerce
Wilbur Ross sought to add a question
to the 2020 U.S. census that would have
read, “Is this person a citizen of the
United States?” Ross is a banker who
specialized in bankruptcy before join-
ing the Trump Administration; earlier,
he had handled cases involving the in-
solvency of Donald Trump’s casinos. The
Census Bureau objected to the question
Ross proposed. Eighteen states, the Dis-
trict of Columbia, fifteen cities and coun-
ties, the United Conference of Mayors,
and a coalition of non-governmental or-
ganizations filed a lawsuit, alleging that
the question violated the Constitution.
Last year, United States District
Court Judge Jesse Furman, in an opin-
ion for the Southern District, found
Ross’s attempt to add the citizenship
question to be not only unlawful, and
quite possibly unconstitutional, but also,
given the way Ross went about trying
to get it added to the census, an abuse
of power. Furman wrote, “To conclude
otherwise and let Secretary Ross’s de-
cision stand would undermine the prop-
osition—central to the rule of law—
that ours is a ‘government of laws, and
not of men.’” There is, therefore, no cit-
izenship question on the 2020 census.
All this, though, may be by the bye,
because the census, like most other in-
stitutions of democratic government, is
under threat. Google and Facebook,
after all, know a lot more about you, and
about the population of the United
States, or any other state, than does the
U.S. Census Bureau or any national cen-
sus agency. This year may be the last
time that a census is taken door by door,
form by form, or even click by click.
U
ntil ten thousand years ago, only
about ten million men, women, and
children lived on the entire planet, and
any given person had only ever met a
few dozen. (One theory holds that this
is why some very old languages have no
word for numbers.) No one could count
any sizable group of people until human
populations began to cluster together
and to fall under the authority of pow-
erful governments. Taking a census re-
quired administrative skills, coercive force,
and fiscal resources, which is why the
first reliable censuses were taken by Chi-
nese emperors and Roman emperors, as
the economist Andrew Whitby explains
