It is voluntary. The two times I have been approached by census takers I declined to participate. They had no problem with that, everything stayed friendly, they thanked me and left. There was never a consequence.
The last time, during the last census, the census worker asked me why. I asked her if she knew about census data being used to round up U.S. citizens with unpopular ancestry and put them into concentration camps. She didn't, so I told her a little about the Japanese internment when my father was a teenager, and that I too have unpopular ancestry, and would prefer not to be on their list. She was agreeable.
In practice I don't think anyone has been charged for denying the census in many many years. In law, it's not actually voluntary and you're pretty much riding on the census takers not caring lately rather than any actual status of whether the census is voluntary. If unpopular ancestry were a target of the census data again then I'd bet the lack of caring from the census takers goes away too, and the law needn't change to support that.
Regardless, this is actually about the ACS anyways.
I am not sure if "not caring" is the right perspective. The census takers have a very limited ability to compel you to answer and are not going to show up on your doorstep with law enforcement or threaten fines for not answering.
People threatening or attacking census workers isn't uncommon. This article is from 2010 and due to increased political polarization, it would probably be worse today:
Its in-voluntary. If you get a mailing, it will say "your response is required by law". Probably the in-person census takers either don't know that or are instructed not to argue with you about it, that doesn't mean the census bureau can't legally make you miserable if it wants to.
I throw those mailings away. I assume that's why the census workers show up.
There have been no prosecutions or even fines for failing to respond to the census in more then fifty years. So de jure involuntary, de facto voluntary.
Semi-related, I've been getting calls from the CDC lately to take a phone survey about immunizations. I know the calls are from legit government numbers, they're not a scam. But I can't bring myself to contribute data to whatever twisted narrative they're going to push with it.
There's a good chance I'm overthinking it and being paranoid, but I'd never have had that resistance under any other Republican administration in the past.
Most people here are reading the headline and thinking that they’re pushing to make the census voluntary. The article actually says that they’re pushing to make the American Community Survey (ACS) voluntary. These are different things. According to the article, the ACS was started in 2006 and is conducted every year.
I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.
I work for state government. We've used the ACS survey to try and determine whether we were unfairly targeting non-native English speakers with some of our decisions. It's also used a lot in academia.
If I had to guess, commercial organizations have access to more invasive and higher quality data that they obtain through credit card companies, lexus-nexus or other data brokers. This attitude mostly harms organizations involved in the social sciences.
I used to work for commercial organizations that sold marketing data and when some Republican senator came out against ACS, there was a bunch of activity to lobby hard to keep it. If we didn't need it, we wouldn't have spent all that money.
We mainly used it as cheap check of things and checksum against data we were getting. Without it, it would have been big blow.
Well, the survey is constitutionally mandated, whereas the ACS is just a law, so they exist on two different levels of enforceability and responsibility. The government can't not do a census; it's not permitted. The ACS can have its rules revised with no problem.
Judging from the past, making the census voluntary in the same way as the vote in federal elections would have this peculiar capacity to be used to skew the results in favor of any result the designers should choose. So of course this should be pushed by the Republicans. It's much easier to avoid unpleasant facts when you can effectively erase the existence of inconvenient groups of people.
Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed to advocate for smaller government and minimal access to any data except for that required to perform government's mandates according to the various governmental agency charters.
The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors.
My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.
> contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector
People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.
Every interaction I have ever had with the government contradicts this. So does every person I know who has a job that involves frequent interaction with the government.
When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly?
On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing?
When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention?
When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords?
And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
What a bizarre argument. Where is the implication even coming from that gets you to the idea they can't think government services can be better for the people than private products unless you "agree with the US's current budget". Why would the current us budget, good or bad, efficiently spent or not, deeply corrupt or perfectly honest, be the only criteria for having an opinion on shared services versus private market?
Are you trying to say that you think the current US budget is bad and therefore all government spending for all time is inherently bad and worse than every other option? If so that's a really weak take.
It depends. The military is not particularly efficient, but it's not clear whether that is desirable. The tax system is not efficient, but that is by design of the industry. Many other organizations are surprisingly efficient actually, hence why some of DOGE's scalpel treatment was so harmful.
The government is an enormous ship and you want enough checks and balances to ensure it cannot suddenly turn on a dime without a huge emergency.
As for the debt, that mostly comes down to:
1) Military spending to enforce US domination across the globe.
2) Social security for the Boomers (many countries are being hit by this).
3) Unsustainably low tax rates given the requirements of government. In particular, the presence of numerous tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy.
4) The insanity of the healthcare industry in the US.
The meaning of the word "efficiency" is highly contextual.
Operation Warp Speed rapidly developed and distributed a totally novel COVID vaccine to billions of people in just two years, but was extremely costly. Was that efficient?
The number of federal employees per American citizen has been shrinking for 80 years. Is that efficient, if it also leads to long waits for government visits?
The United States has not fought a peer state in war for decades - largely because billions of dollars are spent to build bombs that will spend their entire lives in a warehouse. Is that efficient?
Large organizations tend to operate the same way regardless of their ideology. The only real difference between government and private orgs is that one of them will fail faster under stress - and much like efficiency, whether that's good or bad depends on context.
> to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector
Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think.
In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that.
> to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors
That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.
> that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement
Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.
Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."
The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either and like everything it must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Enshittification is inevitable, but would be easily undone if the anti-trust laws were properly enforced. It's a beautiful balancing act, and we can't get there by black-and-white "government bad/good, private bad/good". At least, that's what I think.
It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.
That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout (like midterm elections). According to the New York Times: "New data, based on authoritative voter records, suggests that Donald Trump would have done even better in 2024 with higher turnout." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-elect... see also https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec... ("But even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%, according to Pew's validated voters survey.").
When "higher turnout" is still low enough in national elections that the missing amount is more than the differential in the popular vote, this doesn't disprove anything. You're citing an approximate statistical poll to try to mitigate that, but the entire point of the census is that right now the way it works is to try its best _not_ use those methods and instead attempt to actually get responses from everyone.
"Modeled" is the key point here. If one accepts the premise that modeling is close enough to reality that the differences aren't meaningful to be worth measuring with a full census count, then the change to census collection won't seem problematic. If one rejects that premise, it follows that the difference between the statistical modeling and the reality of a full census count might be significant enough to be worth measuring. That "difference" is a chunk of people who might not fit the expectations of the modeling, and it would be entirely expected that the ones who would benefit more from the model's expectations compared to the full census count would be the ones who are in favor of using the modeling.
> That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout
The variance in voting preferences dominates this effect. We simply have insufficient data to make statements like this confidently, a fact being laid bare by the potential fuckup that has been the Texas redirecting.
Both Pew and Blue Rose Research have confidently stated that Trump would have won by 3-5 points if everyone had voted. These conclusions were based on thousands to millions of samples, far more than a typical poll.
> Both Pew and Blue Rose Research have confidently stated that Trump would have won by 3-5 points if everyone had voted
Correct. Re-run that analysis today, however, and the benefit of turnout may have shifted. That’s the point. There isn’t a consistent partisan tilt in turnout.
In 2020, turnout did not benefit Trump. I suspect, given his economic track record, it will not again in 2026 and 2028.
It may be clear with the benefit of hindsight that a higher turnout in 2024 would have further benefited Trump. But the Republicans have not typically acted with the intention to make it easier for arbitrary members of the public to vote (happy to be corrected), and I don't expect them to act in this interest in the future.
Republicans and Trump supporters are two overlapping but distinct groups. A lot of establishment Republican approaches were based on ideas that are obsolete in the Trump era. Trump can win enough Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens or Hindi nationalists in New Jersey to win the popular vote. Mitt Romney Republicans can’t.
There is nothing about right-wing politics that inherently benefits from a limited electorate. After all, Latin American countries regularly flip-flop between far-left and far-right leaders, like in Brazil with Bolsonaro, or Modi in India. The increase in immigrants in the U.S. and expansion of the electorate to include them won’t get rid of “Republicans,” like many had hoped. Instead, it simply changed what kind of right-wing party could form a viable majority coalition.
At the polls, Republicans primarily benefit from Republicans not being in office. Being the opposition party lets them trick more people with their signature fake appeals to liberty and patriotism like small government, fiscal responsibility, the second amendment, anti- war and foreign interventions, international strength, claims of political persecution, demands for accountability, etc.
When they're actually in office it's obvious that they have absolutely zero intention of following these ideals, but rather just abuse them in hypocritical displays of naked power. So it's only a diminishing number of true-believer type followers that continue twisting themselves into every-tighter knots of cognitive dissonance.
This is why they often start flashy wars - to distract from outright harmful domestic agendas and try to bolster support based on some common external enemy. Tramp himself is of course also trying to distract from the revelations of long term spicy kompromat hanging over his head. The things some people will do to get a loan, smh.
Seeing every issue in black and white is simplistic, and can cause issues. Seeing shades of gray is better. Attempting to avoid bias by seeing only a single shade of gray, as you are suggesting, is obviously not going to be very effective for percieving the world.
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
"Republican bills would make the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey voluntary and bar enforcing mandatory responses to any census survey, citing privacy concerns and raising data-quality warnings."
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
"SEC. 605. None of the funds in this Act may be used to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census."
"What poor/vulnerable people? There's none in the US, look at the census data! Clearly we don't need to do anything for them!"
FTA:
"The ACS, an offshoot of the decennial census, contains roughly 70 questions on housing, employment, education, health, military service, and other demographic details. Each question has been ordered by Congress or requested by an agency to carry out its mission. “But some of them are pretty invasive,” says a spokesperson for Steube, citing questions about when someone begins their daily commute to work and whether they have difficulty getting dressed."
They're sensitive, not invasive. And the whole point is to find out if there are people with sensitive needs, so we can help them.
The Republican party just doesn't like the idea of helping people. Anything that could improve people's lives gives them the willies.
The inital goal of counting every person for determining congressional appointments seems trivial in our modern surveillance state. I feel like we know this answer every minute of every day even without a census.
I don't understand why it became a 70 question survey you are forced to answer. A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
> A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
I think this is a reinvention of history, because much of American history, and the writings of the founders, do not seem to imply this. The core value to my understanding is "no taxation without representation", probably followed by freedom of speech (from government). I don't think this is true anymore though, given how many people are happy for the king to impose taxes on them at will.
People fought interstate highway construction too. In some cases, they were right; people in the Boston area are generally pretty happy the pushback against the Inner Belt that would've demolished half of Cambridge was successful.
The Canadian conservative government (2006-2015) tried that and it contributed significantly to their embarrassing defeat in 2015. They won a solid majority in May 2011, then out of the blue in June 2011 they announced the upcoming census would get rid of the detailed long-form version which is the basis for how the government decides and justifies where and how resources are spent. This was not mentioned in the election campaign at all, was not on any mainstream person's mind, the census was not opposed by anyone other than random western fringe groups, so when the conservatives made a big push for it, people sensed that they wanted to get of data and reality that contradicted conservatives views and policies.
This change was still a significant issue more than four years later in the 2015 election. The long-form census was re-instated the day after the Liberal government took power and people were genuinely happy to fill out their 2016 census.
Years ago when it became apparent that there was a schism between the Republican platform, and the median values of Americans I thought that inevitably Republicans would tack to the middle, that their platform would evolve as the way to remain relevant. Both parties have done that in the past.
I did not forsee what we see today: blatant attempts to maintain power through force and subversion of the electoral system.
Any reflection on why you didn't foresee it, or your relationships to the people who did? Because a lot of people did see it, after all, and consistently got scolded for being partisan or "hysterical." The republicans have been increasingly clear about their goals for over a generation, dropping all euphemism and pretense about a decade ago.
What do you mean median values? Trump 2020 won the most votes of any sitting president ever. Then he won the popular vote in 2024.
Honestly given US history (slavery, individualism etc) I'm surprised democracy has lasted so long here. The Economist rates the US as a "flawed democracy", it has been undergoing erosion for a long time.
> Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and yet too many people don't really believe in that. If you like meritocracy, that's not equality. If you like capitalism, well it strongly tends towards economic inequality, which historically breaks down the democratic order. If you like American supremacy over China, male dominance over women, white supremacy over minorities, etc etc power fantasies.
The word “democracy” comes from ancient Greece, most famously Athens - the term was coined to refer to Cleisthenes‘ reforms in the 5th century BCE - prior to that point only upper class men could vote, the “democratic” reforms extended voting rights to all male citizens who had completed their military training - so excluding women, slaves, freed slaves, resident foreigners, and men who hadn’t completed military training (which normally started around 18 and went for two years) - so only 10% to 20% of the population could vote, although that was still a lot more than prior to the reforms-before the reforms, power was limited to the top 1% or so of men, who came from the wealthiest families
So your idea that democracy requires equality is completely ignoring the actual history of the word.
Athenian democracy ran into two successful coups because of those internal flaws, and ultimately didn't last that long. It's better viewed as a "v0.1-alpha" than a final version
I wouldn't quite say "democracy requires equality". It's more accurate to say "inequality is corrosive". The amount of damage done depends on how much inequality and for how long and what countermeasures are taken (eg redistribution of wealth, expansions of rights, safety nets etc).
Democracy-in the contemporary sense that you were defining it (near-universal adult suffrage)-is only a bit over a century old, in its widespread existence. Maybe too soon to judge what its long-term prospects will be?
And I think if we look at history-sometimes excessive inequality is the downfall of a regime, yes; but then regimes also fall for lots of other reasons, and on other occasions inequality can endure seemingly-sustainably for centuries or even millennia.
If age is your biggest concern, you should go fight vaccines. Most of them are less than 100 years old too. No telling what the long term prospects are on our DNA. Go ahead, ping me when you’re done.
The two topics have nothing to do with each other. I don’t have any issue with vaccines.
And I don’t actually have any problem with democracy per se either - I just think some of the things you have been saying about the topic are overly simplistic.
It is voluntary. The two times I have been approached by census takers I declined to participate. They had no problem with that, everything stayed friendly, they thanked me and left. There was never a consequence.
The last time, during the last census, the census worker asked me why. I asked her if she knew about census data being used to round up U.S. citizens with unpopular ancestry and put them into concentration camps. She didn't, so I told her a little about the Japanese internment when my father was a teenager, and that I too have unpopular ancestry, and would prefer not to be on their list. She was agreeable.
In practice I don't think anyone has been charged for denying the census in many many years. In law, it's not actually voluntary and you're pretty much riding on the census takers not caring lately rather than any actual status of whether the census is voluntary. If unpopular ancestry were a target of the census data again then I'd bet the lack of caring from the census takers goes away too, and the law needn't change to support that.
Regardless, this is actually about the ACS anyways.
I am not sure if "not caring" is the right perspective. The census takers have a very limited ability to compel you to answer and are not going to show up on your doorstep with law enforcement or threaten fines for not answering.
People threatening or attacking census workers isn't uncommon. This article is from 2010 and due to increased political polarization, it would probably be worse today:
https://www.npr.org/2010/06/21/127988332/census-workers-face...
Its in-voluntary. If you get a mailing, it will say "your response is required by law". Probably the in-person census takers either don't know that or are instructed not to argue with you about it, that doesn't mean the census bureau can't legally make you miserable if it wants to.
I throw those mailings away. I assume that's why the census workers show up.
There have been no prosecutions or even fines for failing to respond to the census in more then fifty years. So de jure involuntary, de facto voluntary.
Semi-related, I've been getting calls from the CDC lately to take a phone survey about immunizations. I know the calls are from legit government numbers, they're not a scam. But I can't bring myself to contribute data to whatever twisted narrative they're going to push with it.
There's a good chance I'm overthinking it and being paranoid, but I'd never have had that resistance under any other Republican administration in the past.
Most people here are reading the headline and thinking that they’re pushing to make the census voluntary. The article actually says that they’re pushing to make the American Community Survey (ACS) voluntary. These are different things. According to the article, the ACS was started in 2006 and is conducted every year.
I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.
I’ve gotten ACS twice and refused both times over how intrusive it is. You can read the survey here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/que...
My biggest complaint about it is it’s used a ton by private sector so it’s basically government sponsored research for companies.
I work for state government. We've used the ACS survey to try and determine whether we were unfairly targeting non-native English speakers with some of our decisions. It's also used a lot in academia.
If I had to guess, commercial organizations have access to more invasive and higher quality data that they obtain through credit card companies, lexus-nexus or other data brokers. This attitude mostly harms organizations involved in the social sciences.
I used to work for commercial organizations that sold marketing data and when some Republican senator came out against ACS, there was a bunch of activity to lobby hard to keep it. If we didn't need it, we wouldn't have spent all that money.
We mainly used it as cheap check of things and checksum against data we were getting. Without it, it would have been big blow.
Researchers use the ACS too. I used it at a hackathon in college to help local nonprofits better decide where to allocate their limited resources
Would you rather the data only be visible to well funded companies?
So we need this bailout to even the playing field?
Between giant corporations and research scientists? Yes?
This is an important distinction, but I don't believe it negates the other discussion as far as the principle involved.
Well, the survey is constitutionally mandated, whereas the ACS is just a law, so they exist on two different levels of enforceability and responsibility. The government can't not do a census; it's not permitted. The ACS can have its rules revised with no problem.
Judging from the past, making the census voluntary in the same way as the vote in federal elections would have this peculiar capacity to be used to skew the results in favor of any result the designers should choose. So of course this should be pushed by the Republicans. It's much easier to avoid unpleasant facts when you can effectively erase the existence of inconvenient groups of people.
Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed to advocate for smaller government and minimal access to any data except for that required to perform government's mandates according to the various governmental agency charters.
The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors.
My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.
> contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector
People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.
Every interaction I have ever had with the government contradicts this. So does every person I know who has a job that involves frequent interaction with the government.
When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly?
On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing?
When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention?
When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords?
And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
Unless you agree with the US's current budget (and the staggering debt it entails), you can't say that the government is particularly efficient.
What a bizarre argument. Where is the implication even coming from that gets you to the idea they can't think government services can be better for the people than private products unless you "agree with the US's current budget". Why would the current us budget, good or bad, efficiently spent or not, deeply corrupt or perfectly honest, be the only criteria for having an opinion on shared services versus private market?
Are you trying to say that you think the current US budget is bad and therefore all government spending for all time is inherently bad and worse than every other option? If so that's a really weak take.
It depends. The military is not particularly efficient, but it's not clear whether that is desirable. The tax system is not efficient, but that is by design of the industry. Many other organizations are surprisingly efficient actually, hence why some of DOGE's scalpel treatment was so harmful.
The government is an enormous ship and you want enough checks and balances to ensure it cannot suddenly turn on a dime without a huge emergency.
As for the debt, that mostly comes down to:
1) Military spending to enforce US domination across the globe.
2) Social security for the Boomers (many countries are being hit by this).
3) Unsustainably low tax rates given the requirements of government. In particular, the presence of numerous tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy.
4) The insanity of the healthcare industry in the US.
The meaning of the word "efficiency" is highly contextual.
Operation Warp Speed rapidly developed and distributed a totally novel COVID vaccine to billions of people in just two years, but was extremely costly. Was that efficient?
The number of federal employees per American citizen has been shrinking for 80 years. Is that efficient, if it also leads to long waits for government visits?
The United States has not fought a peer state in war for decades - largely because billions of dollars are spent to build bombs that will spend their entire lives in a warehouse. Is that efficient?
Large organizations tend to operate the same way regardless of their ideology. The only real difference between government and private orgs is that one of them will fail faster under stress - and much like efficiency, whether that's good or bad depends on context.
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> to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector
Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think.
In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that.
> to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors
That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.
> that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement
Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.
Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."
The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either and like everything it must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Enshittification is inevitable, but would be easily undone if the anti-trust laws were properly enforced. It's a beautiful balancing act, and we can't get there by black-and-white "government bad/good, private bad/good". At least, that's what I think.
It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.
That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout (like midterm elections). According to the New York Times: "New data, based on authoritative voter records, suggests that Donald Trump would have done even better in 2024 with higher turnout." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-elect... see also https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec... ("But even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%, according to Pew's validated voters survey.").
When "higher turnout" is still low enough in national elections that the missing amount is more than the differential in the popular vote, this doesn't disprove anything. You're citing an approximate statistical poll to try to mitigate that, but the entire point of the census is that right now the way it works is to try its best _not_ use those methods and instead attempt to actually get responses from everyone.
The study modeled what would have happened if everyone had voted. Another comprehensive study found the same thing. If everyone voted, Trump would have won by almost 5 points: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (slide 6).
"Modeled" is the key point here. If one accepts the premise that modeling is close enough to reality that the differences aren't meaningful to be worth measuring with a full census count, then the change to census collection won't seem problematic. If one rejects that premise, it follows that the difference between the statistical modeling and the reality of a full census count might be significant enough to be worth measuring. That "difference" is a chunk of people who might not fit the expectations of the modeling, and it would be entirely expected that the ones who would benefit more from the model's expectations compared to the full census count would be the ones who are in favor of using the modeling.
> That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout
The variance in voting preferences dominates this effect. We simply have insufficient data to make statements like this confidently, a fact being laid bare by the potential fuckup that has been the Texas redirecting.
Both Pew and Blue Rose Research have confidently stated that Trump would have won by 3-5 points if everyone had voted. These conclusions were based on thousands to millions of samples, far more than a typical poll.
> Both Pew and Blue Rose Research have confidently stated that Trump would have won by 3-5 points if everyone had voted
Correct. Re-run that analysis today, however, and the benefit of turnout may have shifted. That’s the point. There isn’t a consistent partisan tilt in turnout.
In 2020, turnout did not benefit Trump. I suspect, given his economic track record, it will not again in 2026 and 2028.
It may be clear with the benefit of hindsight that a higher turnout in 2024 would have further benefited Trump. But the Republicans have not typically acted with the intention to make it easier for arbitrary members of the public to vote (happy to be corrected), and I don't expect them to act in this interest in the future.
Republicans and Trump supporters are two overlapping but distinct groups. A lot of establishment Republican approaches were based on ideas that are obsolete in the Trump era. Trump can win enough Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens or Hindi nationalists in New Jersey to win the popular vote. Mitt Romney Republicans can’t.
There is nothing about right-wing politics that inherently benefits from a limited electorate. After all, Latin American countries regularly flip-flop between far-left and far-right leaders, like in Brazil with Bolsonaro, or Modi in India. The increase in immigrants in the U.S. and expansion of the electorate to include them won’t get rid of “Republicans,” like many had hoped. Instead, it simply changed what kind of right-wing party could form a viable majority coalition.
At the polls, Republicans primarily benefit from Republicans not being in office. Being the opposition party lets them trick more people with their signature fake appeals to liberty and patriotism like small government, fiscal responsibility, the second amendment, anti- war and foreign interventions, international strength, claims of political persecution, demands for accountability, etc.
When they're actually in office it's obvious that they have absolutely zero intention of following these ideals, but rather just abuse them in hypocritical displays of naked power. So it's only a diminishing number of true-believer type followers that continue twisting themselves into every-tighter knots of cognitive dissonance.
This is why they often start flashy wars - to distract from outright harmful domestic agendas and try to bolster support based on some common external enemy. Tramp himself is of course also trying to distract from the revelations of long term spicy kompromat hanging over his head. The things some people will do to get a loan, smh.
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Yes, the Republicans are putting their anti-truth bias on public display.
Seeing every issue in black and white is simplistic, and can cause issues. Seeing shades of gray is better. Attempting to avoid bias by seeing only a single shade of gray, as you are suggesting, is obviously not going to be very effective for percieving the world.
Is it bias when informed by observable fact?
It's not a bias if it's just history repeating.
Not even mentioning last names (Steube and Risch)
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
Political clickbait title.
Corrected title:
"Republican bills would make the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey voluntary and bar enforcing mandatory responses to any census survey, citing privacy concerns and raising data-quality warnings."
From the article...
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
That text included a link to the bill: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILL...
From that bill I imagine they mean (page 146)
"SEC. 605. None of the funds in this Act may be used to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census."
You're right. Corrected my comment.
Soon:
"What poor/vulnerable people? There's none in the US, look at the census data! Clearly we don't need to do anything for them!"
FTA:
"The ACS, an offshoot of the decennial census, contains roughly 70 questions on housing, employment, education, health, military service, and other demographic details. Each question has been ordered by Congress or requested by an agency to carry out its mission. “But some of them are pretty invasive,” says a spokesperson for Steube, citing questions about when someone begins their daily commute to work and whether they have difficulty getting dressed."
They're sensitive, not invasive. And the whole point is to find out if there are people with sensitive needs, so we can help them.
The Republican party just doesn't like the idea of helping people. Anything that could improve people's lives gives them the willies.
The inital goal of counting every person for determining congressional appointments seems trivial in our modern surveillance state. I feel like we know this answer every minute of every day even without a census.
I don't understand why it became a 70 question survey you are forced to answer. A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
> A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
I think this is a reinvention of history, because much of American history, and the writings of the founders, do not seem to imply this. The core value to my understanding is "no taxation without representation", probably followed by freedom of speech (from government). I don't think this is true anymore though, given how many people are happy for the king to impose taxes on them at will.
> A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
Nobody tell this guy about how the interstate highways got built. Or about how we eradicated a dozen diseases. Or how civilization works, in general.
People fought interstate highway construction too. In some cases, they were right; people in the Boston area are generally pretty happy the pushback against the Inner Belt that would've demolished half of Cambridge was successful.
The Canadian conservative government (2006-2015) tried that and it contributed significantly to their embarrassing defeat in 2015. They won a solid majority in May 2011, then out of the blue in June 2011 they announced the upcoming census would get rid of the detailed long-form version which is the basis for how the government decides and justifies where and how resources are spent. This was not mentioned in the election campaign at all, was not on any mainstream person's mind, the census was not opposed by anyone other than random western fringe groups, so when the conservatives made a big push for it, people sensed that they wanted to get of data and reality that contradicted conservatives views and policies.
This change was still a significant issue more than four years later in the 2015 election. The long-form census was re-instated the day after the Liberal government took power and people were genuinely happy to fill out their 2016 census.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary...
I think we can all guess how this will turn out down south.
Years ago when it became apparent that there was a schism between the Republican platform, and the median values of Americans I thought that inevitably Republicans would tack to the middle, that their platform would evolve as the way to remain relevant. Both parties have done that in the past.
I did not forsee what we see today: blatant attempts to maintain power through force and subversion of the electoral system.
Any reflection on why you didn't foresee it, or your relationships to the people who did? Because a lot of people did see it, after all, and consistently got scolded for being partisan or "hysterical." The republicans have been increasingly clear about their goals for over a generation, dropping all euphemism and pretense about a decade ago.
What do you mean median values? Trump 2020 won the most votes of any sitting president ever. Then he won the popular vote in 2024.
Honestly given US history (slavery, individualism etc) I'm surprised democracy has lasted so long here. The Economist rates the US as a "flawed democracy", it has been undergoing erosion for a long time.
> Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and yet too many people don't really believe in that. If you like meritocracy, that's not equality. If you like capitalism, well it strongly tends towards economic inequality, which historically breaks down the democratic order. If you like American supremacy over China, male dominance over women, white supremacy over minorities, etc etc power fantasies.
The word “democracy” comes from ancient Greece, most famously Athens - the term was coined to refer to Cleisthenes‘ reforms in the 5th century BCE - prior to that point only upper class men could vote, the “democratic” reforms extended voting rights to all male citizens who had completed their military training - so excluding women, slaves, freed slaves, resident foreigners, and men who hadn’t completed military training (which normally started around 18 and went for two years) - so only 10% to 20% of the population could vote, although that was still a lot more than prior to the reforms-before the reforms, power was limited to the top 1% or so of men, who came from the wealthiest families
So your idea that democracy requires equality is completely ignoring the actual history of the word.
Athenian democracy ran into two successful coups because of those internal flaws, and ultimately didn't last that long. It's better viewed as a "v0.1-alpha" than a final version
I wouldn't quite say "democracy requires equality". It's more accurate to say "inequality is corrosive". The amount of damage done depends on how much inequality and for how long and what countermeasures are taken (eg redistribution of wealth, expansions of rights, safety nets etc).
Democracy-in the contemporary sense that you were defining it (near-universal adult suffrage)-is only a bit over a century old, in its widespread existence. Maybe too soon to judge what its long-term prospects will be?
And I think if we look at history-sometimes excessive inequality is the downfall of a regime, yes; but then regimes also fall for lots of other reasons, and on other occasions inequality can endure seemingly-sustainably for centuries or even millennia.
If age is your biggest concern, you should go fight vaccines. Most of them are less than 100 years old too. No telling what the long term prospects are on our DNA. Go ahead, ping me when you’re done.
The two topics have nothing to do with each other. I don’t have any issue with vaccines.
And I don’t actually have any problem with democracy per se either - I just think some of the things you have been saying about the topic are overly simplistic.
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