Census Response Rate – Decatur: 67%, Avondale: 60%
Decatur Metro | April 6, 2010From InDecatur’s recap from last night’s Decatur City Commission meeting…
Peggy: Decatur is currently at 67% census return, vs. goal of 99%.
Well, that goal seemed a bit, shall-we-say, aggressive? So, I ventured over to the Census 2010 website to give that number a bit more context and low and behold, not only is there up-to-date data, but also a handy-dandy map and interactive database! Look I even created this informative comparative chart for Decatur city, DeKalb County, Atlanta city, Avondale and Georgia!
The map itself shows that Decatur is currently ahead in participation among cities in the metro region.
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DM, I could NOT get that chart to work when I tried over the weekend. I suspected we’d have a high participation rate. Those who favor more efficient government and want their taxes saved should fill out the form and send it in. Otherwise, it costs the government more to go after that data.
Yeah, I find the whole idea of (some) Libertarians and teabaggers sitting on their census forms in a shortsighted attempt at civil disobedience very droll. In the short run, you help ensure that more taxpayer money is wasted by requiring census workers to come knock on your door. In the long run, you make it more likely that your community (and, in effect, your point of view) is underrepresented in the government. Nice work! Way to contravene your own politics!
Well there is actually another explanation for the lower than expected participation rates. There are entire neighborhoods in Avondale that did not receive their census forms until Tuesday of this week. some of my neighbors still have not received their forms. We reached out the census office (no result) and the GA count committee and no one can explain this anomaly, but it does pull the participation rate down.
Kinda makes you wonder why they haven’t provided an online response option. Surely if they’re able to track participation rates as in the chart above, they could just as easily prevent duplicate responses so that whether you submitted via online or your mailed form, you’d be counted accurately.
Then again, with something that only occurs once per decade (not to mention something that offers no opportunity for profit, as tax prep/filing does), there’s not a lot of impetus to invest the resources required to develop something akin to the online tax filing system. And whatever you put in place would be obsolete by the time the next census rolled around.
So I guess I just answered my own question.
Actually, I believe that experts within the Census Bureau and National Center for Health Statistics have lots of ideas on how to make the census both more accurate and a lot cheaper. However, the strict constructionists want the Census to be done just like it was written in ?1783?