The census is required by the U.S. Constitution once every ten years to make sure that political power is fairly allocated among the states—and within states at the local level.
Some communities have historically been classified as harder to count fully— including people with lower incomes and people of color — and the Census Counts campaign mobilizes community leaders to do everything they can to prevent people from being missed by the census.
If states and communities are not fully counted, that could cost them a lot of political influence and power as well as money and other resources. Your state could lose a member of Congress, or your city could give up representation in the state legislature to a community that was fully counted. Giving up political power could mean losing out on access to all kinds of resources —without a chance to fix the problem for 10 years.
The Census Counts campaign has opposed the Trump administration’s actions that aim to undercount certain communities: from trying to add a citizenship question, to trying to rush census data processing. The Census Bureau’s own experts have said that actions like these threaten the accuracy of the 2020 count.
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Use these hard-to-count tables to find tracts that have been historically undercounted.