Meanwhile, the judge gave old Wilbur quite the hiding.
In his ruling, Furman said Ross had “ignored, and violated” a statute that requires him to collect data through administrative records instead of through direct inquiries for surveys such as the census.
Furman added that Ross had “failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; — a veritable smorgasbord of classic, clear-cut APA violations.”Seen in that light, it is impossible to accept Defendants’ interpretation of the facts.
In the face of Plaintiffs’ strong evidence that the citizenship question will cause a differential decline in self-response rates among noncitizen households, Defendants demand that Plaintiffs also rebut their unsupported assurances that the Census Bureau will figure out a way to fix the problem, even though it has never done so before. To the extent that Plaintiffs must carry that additional burden, they have done so, as their evidence about NRFU’s inadequacies in this context is far more persuasive than Defendants’ conclusory assertions that NRFU will suddenly work exactly as hoped. In any event, on the whole, a preponderance of the evidence establishes that the incremental net differential decline in self-response rates among noncitizen households caused by the citizenship question, and any similar decline among Hispanics, will remain uncured by NRFU, and will thus ripen into an incremental net differential undercount of the people who live in such households.
In sum, the Court find that the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census will cause an incremental net decline in self-response rates of at least 5.8% among
noncitizen households, and a significant but unquantified net decline in self-response rates among Hispanic households. The Census Bureau’s NRFU operations will not remedy those declines, which means that they will translate into an incremental net differential undercount of people who live in such households in the 2020 census.
Admittedly, it is difficult to precisely quantify the exact size of the net differential undercounts attributable to the citizenship question. Significantly, though, that is because of the
difficulty of quantifying the exact effects of the Census Bureau’s efforts to fix the problem, a subject about which there is frustratingly little quantitative evidence in the record. Starting with the conservative estimate of a 5.8% net decline in self-response rates among noncitizen households, the Court can find little justification in the record to depart from that estimate when arriving at a finding of the likely net undercount of people who live in noncitizen households.
Indeed, as already discussed at great length, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that NRFU operations will simply replicate all of the same effects on noncitizen response that will cause the decline in self-response in the first place.
On the other side of the ledger,Defendants have offered no quantifiable evidence of their own to support, much less quantify, their assertions of NRFU’s hoped-for curative effects.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/census_decision.pdf
Ouch
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Originally Posted by MMC
