constitutional Foundations
The specific interval of years required by the U.S. Constitution between each official headcount.
What is every 10 years?
The year the very first U.S. Census was conducted under the direction of Thomas Jefferson.
What is 1790?
This level of government relies on census numbers to allocate hundreds of billions of tax dollars back to local communities.
What is the federal government?
The decade when the U.S. Census offered a secure online submission portal as the primary method for the first time in history.
What are the 2020s? (2020 Census)
The primary constitutional reason for the census, which determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives.
What is apportionment?
The year the Census Office transitioned from a temporary operation assembled every decade into a permanent federal agency.
What is 1902?
Local governments use population maps from the census to draw boundaries for these voting districts.
What are legislative districts?
Under Title 13 of the U.S. Code, census employees take a lifetime oath to keep this kind of information strictly confidential.
What is personally identifiable information? (Accept: individual answers or private data)
The total number of voting seats in the House of Representatives that are redistributed among the states after each census.
What is 435?
He was the first sitting U.S. President to be counted in the inaugural 1790 headcount.
Who was George Washington?
Private corporations use census demographic data for this purpose when deciding where to build new retail locations.
What is market research?
The legally mandated number of years individual census records must remain locked away before being released to the public and genealogists.
What is 72 years?
The article of the U.S. Constitution that mandates an "actual enumeration" of the population.
What is Article I? (Specifically, Article I, Section 2)
Due to the massive disruptions of the Gold Rush, the census data from 1850 for this western state was completely lost in a fire.
What is California?
This mandatory, continuous rolling survey replaced the traditional census "long form" to provide community data every single year.
What is the American Community Survey (ACS)?
This mathematical privacy technique was introduced in 2020 to add purposeful "noise" to data, protecting identities while keeping statistics accurate.
What is differential privacy?
The body of presidential electors chosen every four years whose state-by-state numbers shift based directly on new census counts.
What is the Electoral College?
In 1970, the census introduced this method of delivery for the first time to allow people to fill out forms without an enumerator visiting.
What is mail-in? (or mail-back questionnaires)
This massive federal health insurance program for low-income individuals relies heavily on census data to distribute its funding.
What is Medicaid?
Invented by Herman Hollerith for the 1890 Census, this early electronic tech used holes in paper cards to tally results.
What is a punch card tabulating machine?