The top official in the U.S. Census Bureau, Robert Santos, was in Sitka last month to talk with city and Sitka Tribe of Alaska officials about ways to improve the accuracy of Alaska’s population numbers in the national census held every 10 years.
The official figures are used to determine congressional districts and some forms of federal funding, and there was a significant undercount of Alaska Natives in the 2020 census, Santos said.
Ever since the census count was released, Wrangell borough officials have complained that the tally undercounted the community. The Census Bureau said the community lost 242 residents, about 11%, between the 2010 and 2020 counts, going from 2,369 to 2,127 residents.
After every census the bureau studies the accuracy of its count and seeks to make improvements, Santos said in Sitka.
“We make an assessment of how well we did, and then we make everything public. And it’s because of that, we can learn where we overcounted and where we undercounted,” he said. “There tend to be historically undercounted populations that include people on tribal lands, people in rural areas, renters, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans. … The issue is, how can we minimize those?”
In 2020 Alaska Natives and American Indians living on reservations were undercounted by 5.64%, bureau data shows. The same populations were undercounted by 4.88% in 2010.
“This time around our supreme challenge was the pandemic,” Santos said. “We had to deal with a society that shut down literally a couple of weeks before the census was going to be launched. And once that launch occurred, it was inevitable. We had to do it, we’re constitutionally obliged.”
He explained, “We did it within the context of not knowing what COVID really was, not having a vaccine. It was a mystery. People were scared. People were losing jobs. People were getting sick, people were dying. People were moving and consolidating households to hunker down. That’s not an ideal situation where you can engender participation. … And going further, it turns out that the populations that are historically harder to count ended up being the populations that were impacted the most by COVID.”
While the pandemic was a major issue in 2020, mistrust of the government was another, he said.
“And we know that that’s not unique to the Census Bureau, but that there’s a general mistrust among a segment of these populations. And there’s also mistrust with this census data collection itself.”
Data gathered in the census is confidential, and in a state as vast as Alaska it’s important for the bureau to work with local groups, Santos said. “We need trusted partners.”
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