WASHINGTON — The 2020 census subdued the population of six states and outnumbered residents in eight others, the Census Bureau said Thursday, a finding that highlighted the difficulties in conducting the most star-crossed population census in living memory.
The conclusions come from a survey of 161,000 housing units conducted after the census was completed, a standard procedure after every once-in-decade count of the American population. The results showed that six states — Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Illinois and Texas — likely have larger populations than officially counted.
Eight states likely have fewer residents than is recorded, the survey finds: Hawaii, Delaware, Rhode Island, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Massachusetts and Ohio. The count in the remaining 36 states and the District of Columbia was basically correct, the agency said.
The results were significantly worse than in the 2010 census, in which none of the states had a statistically significant overcount or undercount, the agency found. But they were no different from the conclusions of the 2000 post-mortem census, which found overcounts in 21 states and an undercount in the District of Columbia.
John H. Thompson, the director of the Census Bureau from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that he wasn’t surprised by the variations, given the problems that haunted the 2020 census. “All counts have over and under counts,” he said. “That doesn’t rule out using the results.”
The Census Bureau said in March that the same survey found undercounts of black and Hispanic people and overcounts of whites and people of Asian descent in national population totals. Overcounts of whites and undercounts of other racial and ethnic groups have been a persistent problem in previous censuses.
The survey was not broad enough to provide reliable estimates of those state-by-state discrepancies, the agency said.
The autopsy will not change the official results of the state census, which said there were 331,459,281 people living in the United States in 2020. Nor will it determine the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives or in state and local political districts, although the findings could arguably have influenced those decisions.
The Supreme Court has banned the use of surveys in the allocation of seats in the House, and in any case, the latest survey has a large margin of error that makes the conclusions appear more like educated guesses than solid findings.
But it does provide insight into where the count probably fell short, and perhaps why. Geographically, five of the six underpopulated states were in the Deep South, while six of the eight most overcounted states were in the North and mostly in the Northeast.
Experts say there are many possible explanations for the disparities in the census, including the Covid-19 pandemic, which roared across the country as the census was taken.
In particular, the pandemic left many people reluctant to open their doors to censuses at a time when the agency was trying to get information on tens of millions of people yet to be counted on census forms.
This is a story in development. Come back for updates.
