The divided US Supreme Court is expected to decide next month whether to allow the Trump Administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 US Census. Whatever the stated justification for this unprecedented change—over the strong objections of census experts—it is widely seen as an effort to suppress the counting of ethnic minorities, shifting additional political power and federal funding to predominately white areas of the United States.
This is a critical moment for American democracy. The census affects much more than congressional reapportionment through redistricting. It determines how a huge slice of taxes gets returned to communities. It helps determine where critical human services are located and resourced. It affects business and economic development. Done right, the census will ensure that political and financial resources flow based on a constitutionally mandated process. Done wrong, the consequences of a census train wreck will be with us for the next decade and beyond. Whether your social mission is democracy, health, injustice, or education, this issue affects your cause.
And for donors, the impact per dollar is incredible—philanthropy can help ensure that billions of federal funds reach those most in need. However, local governments and philanthropy are missing out on one of the biggest opportunities to positively affect the census: supporting the application of modern technology tools to increase the chances of a more complete count.
Getting a complete count will be challenging. The 2020 census has less funding than the previous census in 2010. Census takers will do only half of the in-person follow-ups they did in 2010. The count will increasingly rely on individuals completing an online questionnaire, which poses a challenge for communities with poor online access. Unsurprisingly, mistrust of government is on the rise in many of these same communities.
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The addition of a citizenship question on the 2020 census is not the only effort to suppress the count. Government and cybersecurity experts anticipate disinformation campaigns similar to those used in the last few elections to suppress the vote of certain communities. If bad actors consider the census count worth suppressing, isn’t it also worth actively counteracting such repressive efforts and seeking accuracy?
Some funders have recognized the importance of this: California is investing over $100 million, and a group of national donors are expecting to make more than $30 million in grants to state-level projects (which doesn’t go very far when spread across 49 other states). The Census Bureau itself is spending billions. And other state and local governments are spending hundreds of millions.
Still, state and philanthropic funding to support census technology tools has been anemic. This needs to change—and very quickly in order to have any impact before the census begins in early 2020.
How Investments in Civic Tech Can Help Now
The right tech tools can be a force multiplier for good. The same technology used by businesses to motivate people to buy things can be used to motivate people to complete the census. The same technology that makes it easy for people to find the answers they want can quickly answer questions about the census—answers otherwise buried in a census call center manual. The same technology that has been incredibly effective for political campaigns to get out the vote can be easily adapted to get out the count.
Some donors are leading the way, recognizing the added leverage of this grantmaking opportunity. Last year, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation provided a $280,000 grant to CommunityConnect Labs, a nonprofit helping governments and service providers use mobile messaging to connect with hard-to-reach populations. Their tech-enabled, on-the-ground project identified 2 percent more addresses for census takers to visit in the areas with the hardest to count populations. Based on projected funding formulas of $2,000 per capita, a 2 percent greater count would lead to an additional $300 million in federal funding to local governments in the foundation’s region over ten years. There aren’t many opportunities available to donors which deliver a social return on investment at this scale.
Donors could easily provide more money to other promising projects that are starving for funding to build cheap but scalable civic tech solutions. CommunityConnect Labs has ambitious plans for a handful of other tech tools, including some that could improve the effectiveness of grassroots outreach canvassers, translate the multilingual census FAQs into a text message-oriented chatbot, and identify and report census-related misinformation, particularly that which targets minority communities. PushBlack, a nonprofit media platform for black people, received a pilot grant from a funding collaborative to explore the delivery of trusted messages to the black community to increase census response.
Donors and advocates can support the civil rights community to use better technology to overcome the wave of misinformation that is sure to come. Politically active donors could channel a bit of their expected 2020 spend on voter turnout efforts towards get out the count efforts with similar software tools and databases. As a matter of fact, some groups are already exploring how to combine get-out-the-count efforts with voter registration. Political organizations such as the Asian American advocacy group 18 Million Rising and the leadership and organizational development group New Left Accelerator have been searching for funding to bring experts from get-out-the-vote efforts together with census experts to see if these two communities could work together to increase engagement in the 2020 count.
There’s no better way to express a positive vision for the United States than to support an accurate assessment of who lives here and what they need in order to realize the American dream. The best way to do that is to invest in software and information tools to get out the count.
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Read more stories by Jim Fruchterman.