Tanzina Vega: I'm Tanzina Vega. Welcome back to The Takeaway. Nearly 100 census workers around the country said they had trouble doing their jobs this year because of problems with the technology that was used to get information from Americans for the 2020 census. That's according to reporting from Reveal from the center for investigative reporting.

This year census workers were outfitted with cell phones and a mobile app that was supposed to help them gather data quickly while in the field, but some workers who spoke to Reveal said the technology had a lot of glitches and that the overall process was rushed because of shifting deadlines from the Trump administration. Here's one census worker who spoke to Reveal.

Census Worker: It did start to feel like our attempts were being sabotaged. It got to be pretty demoralizing between the data not saving or our phones not working or [inaudible 00:00:56] us the wrong start times.

Tanzina: In a statement to Reveal, representatives from the US census said that they stood by the technology use this year and noted that they had hired more than 300,000 workers to conduct the 2020 census. Here with me now are two reporters from Reveal, Byard Duncan is an engagement and collaborations reporter, and David Rodriguez is the collaborations and community engagement specialist. Welcome to you both.

David Rodriguez: Hi there.

Byard Duncan: Thanks for having us.

Tanzina: Byard, tell us about the way the census was carried out this year, which was different than prior years.

Byard: To begin with, this was the first time it was carried out using predominantly an iPhone app, a new iPhone app that had some problems from the start. Then, what we heard from enumerators across the country was that this app was sending them on these zigzagging routes that were really inefficient. It kept crashing. It took forever to charge their phones in the middle of their shifts. Some of them would see data from their enumeration efforts, just disappear in the middle of their shift.

Tanzina: David, this was the first year that this technology-- I received a visit from a census worker who took the census on their phone and in about 10 minutes, it seemed pretty efficient. What were some of the technological glitches, David, and how did workers try to get around those?

David: Some of those glitches are that the app itself would crash during mid interview. Imagine you're a worker and you finally have someone that's willing to talk with you during this non-response follow-up operation. One thing that we've heard a lot about is, while you're doing this interview part, the app just crashed on you and you had to wait for it. You had to come back later.

Workers are assigned cases, addresses to follow up to, and that changes per day. Depending on what happens, like you're either going back to the same house or you're not. Another one was the issue of the GPS sending you completely to a different address that isn't where you're supposed to be, ping-ponging you around town. If you're in one apartment, and then you go all the way across town, and then you come back to the first apartment again, and then another one was like the iPhone itself, that the battery would drain pretty rapidly when it lasts you the shift.

Tanzina: Byard, how did census workers think to get in contact with you guys over at Reveal?

Byard: David wrote an initial story that chronicled the technical problems a lot of these workers were having. Then as part of our reporting we created a web form that census workers could reach out to us through. We heard after David's initial reporting, we heard from about 100 of them, and we're still hoping to hear from more, anybody listening could text "census" to 474-747, and I have to say the robotic voice thing of standard data rates apply, but we are still hoping to hear from more folks. Our reporting on this continues obviously as you have a Supreme Court hearing today and for the developments about the census later on.

Tanzina: Let's talk a little bit about the Supreme Court hearing. What's expected?

Byard: My understanding is that today's hearing is over this question of whether or not Donald Trump has the ability to exclude undocumented folks from the count. I think the Supreme Court ruled earlier that he wouldn't be allowed to include a citizenship question, but in July he issued a separate memorandum basically expressing that he has the ability as president to exclude folks from the census. That would go against hundreds of years of census precedent, as well as other laws, but we're going to have to wait and see what the Supreme Court says today. I believe there are oral arguments happening very soon.

Tanzina: This sounds like it could have been a difficult process to undertake, but did it any of this actually affect the data? David, do we know if any of these technical discrepancies actually affected whether or not people were able to complete the censuses? Because, as I said, mine was done in about just a couple minutes at my door.

David: Right now, we're in this process that data, post-data collection process and we don't know that right now for sure. We'll know it once the Bureau does the quality checks, and like every census, is very hard. Every single one, it happens every 10 years.

There are communities that are historically undercounted in the census. Then on top of that, this year we had the pandemic, over here on the West Coast we had fires, a lot of things happened this year that was already going to make the census even harder to count people, so we don't know the implications of the issues that workers were dealing with, but the one thing that they've shared a lot with us is their concerns about some of the things they were being told to do.

Byard: I'll just add that we heard this again and again from census enumerators and supervisors, this idea that external pressure, pressure from the Trump administration to speed up the process was creating on the ground this environment of like competition or really high urgency to close cases, even if there weren't proper enumeration attempts. One thing that's been really striking about this is, if you have a system like the census that has historically grappled with, including marginalized people to begin with, it doesn't take some master scheme to make that exclusion worse.

You just need to introduce a little chaos on the ground, then the corners that get cut, they end up disproportionately hurting those people even more. I think that's what we're seeing here, whether it's enumerators driving around and counting people who live in RVs and being instructed to assume just one person lives in those RVs, or whether it's enumerators outside of apartment buildings, estimating how many people live there based on the number of bikes or cars parked outside. I think what we might see is that pressure ultimately affecting the count of people who historically have been unfair counted anyway.

Tanzina: Was this concentrated in a specific region? The folks that reached out to you, or were you hearing from people across the country?

Byard: This was all across the country, and what we heard is now being echoed in a bunch of other places, there's a lawsuit from the Brennan Center for Justice, where enumerators and supervisors have told very, very similar stories about pressure to close cases without proper efforts to reach people. As for the ultimate consequences for the data, like David said, we don't know yet exactly how this will affect the data, but we have some troubling indications, recently in a four-sentence press release. The census director, Steven Dillingham said that the Bureau had found some anomalies in their data, and NPR, just yesterday, reported that the census is original goal of getting its final tally to President Trump by December 31st, this being, of course, the goal that they invoked to speed up the process so many times.

They're going to miss that goal, and according to the reporting from NPR, they're now actually targeting in January 26th goal which means that the ultimate sign-off for this census is going to land in Joe Biden's hands, not President Trump's.

Tanzina: We'll see how that turns out. Byard Duncan is an engagement and collaborations reporter, and David Rodriguez is the collaborations and community engagement specialist at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Byard and David, thanks so much for joining us.

Byard: Thank you so much.

David: Thanks.

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