Census Conspiracies Strike Back

The far-right has been spreading a lot of nutty conspiracy theories about the Census lately which, as Dave Weigel notes, seems to be leading to below-average return rates in heavily conservative parts of the country. It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.

What’s more, the black fly in your chardonnay here is that well-documented census under-responses could be easily compensated for if the Census Bureau did the sensible thing and attempted to create a statistically accurate model of the American population. But instead—at the insistence of the American right—it’s legally required to just count up the forms, and undercount populations that don’t like to mail forms in.