WASHINGTON — With the 2020 census into its final stage, more than one in three people hired as census takers have quit or failed to show up.
Many still on the job are going door to door in areas that largely track places where there are elevated rates of coronavirus infections, according to calculations by the National Conference on Citizenship, Civis Analytics and The New York Times.
And with 38 million households still uncounted, state and local officials are raising growing concerns that many poor and minority households will be left out of the count.
Covid-19 and rising mistrust of the government on the part of hard-to-reach groups like immigrants and Latinos already had made this census challenging. But another issue has upended it: an order last month to finish the count a month early, guaranteeing that population figures will be delivered to the White House while President Trump is still in office.