The widening racial and ethnic gaps in how accurately different populations are counted in the U.S. census threatens the equitable distribution of political representation and federal funding, warns a new report by an expert panel who reviewed the 2020 national head count.
Most notably, the estimated net undercount rate at which Latinos were left out of the 2020 census was more than three times the rate in the previous once-a-decade tally. For people who identified as white and not Latino, the net overcount rate — fueled by counting a person more than once at different addresses — almost doubled from 2010 to 2020.
“There’s always going to be error in a census,” says Teresa Sullivan, a sociology professor and former president of the University of Virginia, who chaired the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine panel that was commissioned by the Census Bureau.
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