On 10/18/2020 3:43 PM, micky wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Sun, 18 Oct 2020 07:23:18 -0700 (PDT), trader_4
wrote:

On Sunday, October 18, 2020 at 2:57:15 AM UTC-4, micky wrote:
For 100 years, Census Day has been April 1.
https://www.census.gov/history/www/t...verview_1.html

For the 2010 census, a new section was added to the Overview page, Key
2010 Census Dates. The other years don't have this, but at least I
know that for 2010

"April 1, 2010 - Census Day. Households are asked to supply data in
their census questionnaire that is accurate as of April 1.

April 30, 2010 - Enumerators begin door-to-door operations to collect
census data from households to follow up with households that either
didn't mail back their form or didn't receive one.

July 30, 2010 - The toll-free telephone assistance line is closed,
ending 2010 census data collection. More than 130,000 interviews were
completed via the toll-free line."

So that's 3 complete months, during which time there were doorknockers .
Does anyone know how long it was this year. It prob


Not clear from that enumerators were out there for the three full months.

True, not clear from that but it might have been the full 3 months. I
remember that they would start hiring and training 4 or 6 months in
advance. This year, my friend... I have to ask her again. She also
applied to be a contact tracer for Covid. She took online training for
one or both of them and then didn't hear back for a long time, but
anyhow, the question is, when it says in 2010 "Enumerators begin
door-to-door operations to collect census data" were they really out
there going to people's doors on the last day of April.

I hate to say it but I was depressed and hadn't returned my census form
and somoene called me, someone I knew. If I could remember who it was,
I could and would call him for more details, but I can't remember. Other
than that, I don't know how to find more about this.

This year from what I can tell it was two months, maybe a little less,
starting in early August, ending early Oct. It probably varied a bit by
region of the country. But the real issue here is what percentage was
completed this year versus previous years and if it's substantially
different, does it make any difference in the result. They will never get
to 100%, there will always be a few percent left. That is then filled in
using estimates and models based on the 97% or whatever they have. So
if one year they get to 98%, while another year they get to 96%, not clear
that it really matters.

I agree with all of this, and I don't expect the census to be 100%.

They are saying that they've been to 99% of all the residences in
Maryland, but they did that partly by loosening standards on what is
visiting a home. Used to be, on I forget, the second or third trip, the
doorknocker could talk to neighbors and if they said how many were
living there (even if they were occasinally wrong) it counted as a
visit. They weakened that to allow it on the first visit. (My friend
went to some places 3 times before finding a resident who was home and
answsed the door, but she's very diligent. She also liked the job, at
least sometimes, from the interesting places she got to go. One was a
house built in the 1800's for the visit by some German king or
something.)

Even though she lives there, she saw a lot of streets she hadn't seen.
OTOH, if I did it, I think t hey would assign me around here and I've
been down almost every street already.

But I digress:

What I don't want isn't for it to be 100% but for it not to favor
Republican areas at the direction of a Republican. I cetainly didn't
suspect H.W.Bush of doing that, as we all know, stumpie has shown plenty
of signs of trying to corrupt the Census. (For others, originnally in
June or so it was the census bureau, his own appointee I suspect, who
wanted it extended that month. Then something made them change their
mind. Maybe someone from a state that was going lose a Repuiblican
district pointed out to them how they could increase Republican
representation by shortening the


At some point, people that refuse to cooperate
or where contact can't be made, where somone can't be found to provide the
data, another month of pounding on the door isn't going to change the result.

No one pounds on one door for a month.

Whether it will change depends on how thoroughly they've done it
already. Have they really been back 2 more times? That WAS the
standard.

I think they probably doorknocked for 3 full months in 2010, but we
still don't know how long it was in 2020.


As to the completion date, I read under Herman Hollerith

On the Census site above. Hollerith invented the Hollerith card, the
precursor of what was it called, an IBM card? a rectangle with a corner
missing and little rectangualr punch holes. He got the idea from paper
crds that controlled looms as ealy as 1801, that enabled them to make
complicated patterns in cloth. He started at the Census Bureau, but
later started the company that after he left became IBM.

https://www.census.gov/history/www/c...hollerith.html
Herman Hollerith (1860-1929): Hollerith worked briefly for the Census
Office in the run-up to the 1880 census. This experience, along with
some advice from mentor John Shaw Billings, convinced him that the
Census Office desperately needed a better way to tabulate census data
than hand counting. Hollerith was able to invent a device that did just
that: an electric tabulating machine.....

https://www.census.gov/history/www/i...tabulator.html
1888 Competition
Following the 1880 census, the Census Bureau was collecting more data
than it could tabulate. As a result, the agency held a competition in
1888 to find a more efficient method to process and tabulate data.
Contestants were asked to process 1880 census data from four areas in St
Louis, MO. Whoever captured and processed the data fastest would win a
contract for the 1890 census.....

that the 1880
census counting was completed in 1887. So there is no need to be done
by January 2021.

Census day in every year back to 1930 was April 1
In 1920 it was Jan 1, of all things.
In 1910 it was April 15
In 1900 it iwas June 1

The url above goes back to 1790 but I don't have time to read everything
now.



"roughly 4 out of 10 households nationwide have yet to be included in
the constitutionally mandated count that is used to redistribute
congressional seats, Electoral College votes and federal funding among
the states."


"Republicans in Congress are signaling that the Census Bureau cannot
take the extra time it has said it needs to count every person living in
the U.S. amid the coronavirus pandemic €” even if that risks leaving some
residents out of the 2020 census.

Rushing to deliver new state-population counts to the president by Dec.
31, and more detailed data to the states by March 31, 2021, as required
by current federal law, could risk severe inaccuracies in the
once-a-decade count, especially among people of color, immigrants, rural
residents and other historically undercounted groups.

With 95 days until the Census Bureau plans to stop tallying the
country's residents at the end of October, roughly 4 out of 10
households nationwide have yet to be included in the constitutionally
mandated count that is used to redistribute congressional seats,
Electoral College votes and federal funding among the states.

Democrats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives have
introduced legislation, including the House Democrats' latest
coronavirus relief bill, that would grant four-month extensions to the
legal deadlines in response to requests in April by the Census Bureau
and the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau."