Concerns About Census 2020, As Told by GIFs

It seems dire warnings about the status of Census 2020 have become a sort of cottage industry among media outlets. Now Alvin Chang and the data visualization team at Vox are the latest to round up all the bad, potentially disastrous, news about the upcoming census.

Chang provides background on the historical moment—the constitutional mandate for the census, its well-documented shortcomings (especially when counting vulnerable populations), and the political forces resisting improvements to the census's methods. That's all prelude to the forthcoming edition of the census, when several issues threaten to completely undermine the process, according to Chang:

• Republicans have underfunded the effort.
• The Census Bureau is using new technology to try to cut costs — but that new technology isn’t being properly tested because of the lack of funds.
• The Trump administration also added a question about citizenship that could scare immigrants away from responding.
• Oh, and the Census Bureau has been without a leader since Thompson resigned last year.

The article goes into detail about each of these points, while also deploying a series of cartoons to illustrate the concerns.

Previous reading on the concerns about the U.S. Census:

• A First Look at the Proposed 2020 Census
• Explained: The Risks Facing the 2020 Census
• 'High Risk' of Failure: The 2020 Census
• More Sources Expressing Alarm at the Budgetary Fate of the 2020 Census