U.S. Supreme Court Agrees With Trump Administration To End 2020 Census

WASHINGTON DC Yesterday, October 13, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to stop the 2020 census from continuing through the end of October.

President Trump’s administration had asked the nation’s high court to suspend a district court’s order permitting the 2020 census to continue through October 31.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone dissenter from the unsigned court order. She wrote: “meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying, especially when the Government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress.”

The Trump administration said the once-a-decade headcount needed to end immediately.

This would allow the US Census Bureau time to crunch the numbers before a congressionally mandated deadline to determine how many congressional seats each state will receive.

The numbers also determine how many Electoral College votes each state has to determine who becomes the U.S. president in 2024 and 2028.

A coalition had sued the Trump administration, arguing that people of color and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the count ended early.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced it will keep accepting responses online at My2020Census.gov through Oct. 15 until 11:59 p.m. Hawaii time.

The bureau has also set Oct. 15 as the postmark deadline for paper forms as well as the end date for collecting phone responses and door knocking at unresponsive households.