This article by Clara Fong and Kelly Percival is published by Brennan Center for Justice. Here is an excerpt:

On March 10, the Census Bureau published the initial results of its major qual­ity check on the 2020 Census. While the bureau’s Post-Enumer­a­tion Survey suggests that the census very accur­ately coun­ted the total number of people living in the coun­try, it also showed that this decade’s data suffered from the same seri­ous prob­lem that past censuses have: signi­fic­ant under­counts in many communit­ies of color.

These persist­ent under­counts complic­ate the census’s abil­ity to perform its basic func­tions and should serve as a wake-up call and spur action for future fixes.

What is the Post-Enumer­a­tion Survey?

The Post-Enumer­a­tion Survey is a sample survey the bureau conducts shortly after the decen­nial census. Its goal is to meas­ure how well the Census Bureau coun­ted people and captured basic demo­graphic inform­a­tion, specific­ally the age, sex, race, and ethni­city for each person in the coun­try. This data is used to produce two estim­ates that help eval­u­ate the coun­t’s accur­acy. The first is how many people were under­coun­ted or over­coun­ted in the census, known as “net cover­age error.”  The second is how many people were correctly coun­ted, erro­neously coun­ted, or missed alto­gether, known as “compon­ents of cover­age.” This data gives the public a sense of how accur­ate the 2020 Census ulti­mately was compared to prior censuses, and it gives the bureau a sense of what it needs to improve before the next one.

Read the full article here.