The NAACP has revived its lawsuit alleging that the government’s plans for the 2020 Census are “conspicuously deficient” and will lead to a massive undercount of communities of color.
The suit, brought by the organization’s national and Prince George’s County offices along with the county itself, says the Census Bureau’s decision to scale down operations for the upcoming count will result in inaccurate data that will “dilute the votes of racial and ethnic minorities [and] deprive their communities of critical federal funds.”
The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, names the bureau and its director in addition to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. It is a revised version of one the NAACP filed in March 2018. After a district court dismissed that case, an appeals court overturned some of the decision, allowing the amended suit to go forward.
It seeks to compel the bureau to spend more money, which it says Congress has already allocated, to beef up staffing, field offices and advertising in communities with high percentages of minorities and immigrants, which are typically undercounted. A spokesman for the Census Bureau said it does not comment on ongoing or pending litigation, and the Commerce Department declined to comment.
Prince George’s County, home to a sizable population of minorities, suffered the largest net undercount of any county in Maryland and one of the nation’s largest undercounts for counties of 100,000 or more residents, according to the suit.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Tara Bahrampour over at the Washington Post