As U.S. Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham visited a mobile questionnaire assistance site in front of the Oklahoma capitol building on Friday, he announced the bureau will be sending an additional 130 enumerators from different states to help with Oklahoma’s efforts.
The state is about 90% enumerated, but Dillingham said there’s still a lot of work to do in order to get close to 100%.
“When the people come in, they have pledged to work long hours, some are working eight to 10 hours a day, all weekdays and on the weekends to get the job done,” Dillingham said. “Fantastic commitment by these people.”
Currently, Oklahoma has one of the lowest rates of people responding to the census on their own, at about 60%, ranking 41st in the country. That means that census workers will have to do more work to make sure everyone is counted, risking inaccuracies. There are about 2,100 census enumerators in the state.
Dillingham said the bureau looks at every state toward the end of every census to determine if additional counters are needed based on response rates and the size of the state. Brent Kisling, executive director of the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, said Oklahoma census efforts have ramped up over the years and said more spending is making a difference.
“In the year 2000, we spent very little time, very little money focused on the census,” Kisling said. “And that was the year we lost our sixth congressional seat. We did the same thing in 2010. We had no state appropriation for the effort. We didn't have a state committee.”
The Oklahoma Department of Commerce has spent about $500,000 on the census engagement campaign, but most money has been spent through partnerships Kisling said. This year, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order to create a complete count committee to help reach higher.
It’s estimated that for every person that does not fill out the census, the state loses $1,675 each year in federal funding. More than 300 federal programs rely on data derived from the census to allocate some or all of its funding — about $1.5 trillion in 2017.
The deadline to fill out the census is Sept. 30 and can be filled out online.
