Stand Up and Be Counted

National census forms were due on April 16, the day after federal income taxes were due. Unlike income taxes, you have no reason to worry if you did not turn in this form on time. Although census forms were mailed out in March, census takers will go door to door starting in May to ensure United States residents are counted. This means that those who did not receive a form in the mail will still be included.

One may ask why we should care about the census. It has been important throughout American history. Before the Civil War, each slave was counted fully to determine the population but as three fifths of a person to determine seats for the United States House of Representatives. According to the National Archives, Native Americans were only counted starting in 1860 if they did not live on reservations or unsettled land. The way people have been counted has led to debate in America's past.

The census is important even now. Although the total number of representatives does not change, states can gain or lose representatives to other states. States can lose representatives if their rate of population growth is less than that of other states. States with a recent wave of immigrants can gain representatives. For example, Utah—which has a large population of Mormon missionaries—cannot count its residents living abroad. Prisoners are counted as residents of the prison and not their residence before incarceration, leading to areas with large prison populations being better represented in Congress.

The census utilizes a secure program to protect residents' privacy. All census employees are sworn to not show or tell census information to anybody, including other federal organizations and regardless of their continued employment with the U.S. Census Bureau. This means that the Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot access census information to search for residents living in the country illegally. This also means census employees can be fined or jailed if they do disclose personal details such as GPS coordinates and Social Security numbers.

The census is published to the public seventy-two years after enumeration, but it never publishes private information. The library has Arkansas census information between 1870 and 1930 on microfilm and, with a library card, through Heritage Quest. The microfilm details a wealth of information not only about numbers of people but age, race, ethnicity, and religion. In addition, it makes subtle references to cultural norms through word choice. Terms now considered politically incorrect such as “idiot” were used to count residents with mental disabilities. This leads one to wonder if the terminology we use will be laughable to our grandchildren when they look through our census results in 2082.