Early winners are areas that had obvious technical problems in the census. Due to mapping issues and uncertain boundaries, prisons in Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee were misplaced, and populations were mistakenly added to nearby areas.

For example, in Whiteville, Tennessee, nearly 2,000 returned to that number in 2020, a 75% increase from the census of 2,606 after the prison population was accidentally added from a nearby area. Timothy Kuhn, director of the Tennessee Data Center in Knoxville, said:

The boost will cost the town an estimated $167 per capita, or $327,000 annually, in annual state funds distributed based on population, according to State Data Sharing estimates.

However, the largest cases in big cities are still pending, especially affecting areas with large populations of racial minorities.

The Census Bureau’s new amendments show changes approved under the Count Question Resolution process for areas within Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Census Bureau records show 32 in the same state, as well as parts of California, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah Other changes are still under consideration, including Total cases filed so far.

Another 23 cases were submitted in a similar program for a number of institutions, including college dormitories and nursing homes, but their results have not yet been published.

Much like Yuma County, Arizona, chaos continues. There, the early results of the count correction show the town of Somerton gaining six.

But the city of Yuma was told only that seven of the 20 challenges had been approved. The city won’t discover it until 2024, said state demographer Jim Chang.

It’s typical of other communities disputing the number of census figures that have been approved but not yet published, said Terry Ann Lowenthal, a Connecticut-based census consultant.

“The Census Bureau needs to be more transparent about this,” said Lowenthal. “Local governments put a lot of effort into reviewing and compiling evidence about underestimation, and they are very frustrated when the answer is a written resolution that gives unexplained results.”

The Census Bureau declined to answer for the record, but pointed to public documents explaining why it withheld details in some previous tally reviews. This is to maintain a small area to protect privacy and confidentiality rules for individual institutions.

State and local governments have until June 30 to submit cases to the Counting Question Solving Program, or another program called the Post-Census Group Quarters Review, which reviews the counts of institutions such as prisons and college dormitories. there is.

Census takers faced considerable confusion over how to count people in facilities in the spring of 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when many students went home and nursing homes stopped accepting visitors. bottom.

The largest cases in large cities such as Austin, Texas. Memphis, Tennessee. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Tempe, Arizona is still pending. Milwaukee is seeking an increase of almost 16,000 people, a large part of the nearly 18,000 population decline recorded in 2020 compared to 2010.

The city has evidence to support claims that some housing units were missed and others were incorrectly listed as vacant, according to Jordan Primakow, Milwaukee’s senior government relations manager.

The city isn’t expected to be entirely successful — the Census Bureau’s challenge program doesn’t include reconsidering vacancy decisions — but it’s important to note the reasons for the underestimation anyway.

“The criteria they are willing to review are very narrow,” he said.

Primakow adds that undercounting problems are typical in urban areas with large minority populations, like Milwaukee, and the Census Bureau is encouraging people to submit information that will help future counts, even if current guidelines can’t fix it. encouraged each city.

In its 2022 report, the Census Bureau admitted that it undercounted Black residents by 3.3% and Latino residents by almost 5% in 2020.

“I’ll throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks,” he said. “We can’t keep saying, ‘I’m sorry, we underestimated minority groups again.’ At some point, we have to do something about it.”