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2010 Census still stuck in snailmail stone age
March 2, 2010 | 9:15 am
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By Chris Meadows
Blogger Ben Forta remarks on a strange conundrum. The 2010 US Census has a fancy website, a blog, and is using social networking to spread the word…but when it comes down to actually filling out and sending in the census form, they require you to mail it back.
Using snailmail.
The site says they are considering response via Internet “for the future”. Of course, the next “future” census is in 2020.
It seems awfully strange in a world where we can download music, movies, and books, and so many government agencies (such as unemployment insurance) have web forms, that the census is not making web response available. It sure would be more convenient for most citizens than to have to fill something out on paper and send it in.
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Comments:
And don’t forget the time and money saved on the receiving end when the information doesn’t have to be scanned/keyboarded into a database.
economic stimulus for the usps?
This may be the least of the government’s paper-age stickiness… after all, the census doesn’t come out often.
But how about the Federal Budget, that 2,500-page, multi-volume behemoth that is printed and distributed each year? If there was ever a document that needed to be digitized for good, that would be it.
Politics. The results of the US census affects things like the balance of power in Congress and how much money (proportionally and otherwise) is handed out to different groups/states.
If you look hard enough, you’ll find numerous articles about different groups trying to influence the outcome. How the surveys are returned is one such example.
It’s like manipulating the ability of different groups to vote (moving polling places, etc.) so that “your” group gets more votes than the “other guy”
and you “win”.
Nothing new about it. It’s just more obvious some yers than others.
I think we should cut the Census some slack here.
Millions of people do not own a computer.
How would the Census know who does and does not have access to one? Should they still mail a form to everyone?
Since so many folks are paranoid about privacy and the web how many people would be reluctant to respond only via a web site form? Would the government in fact want to log and analyze IP addresses and the responses? I would – I think there would be lots of interesting nuggets of data to glean from that whether it is personally identifiable or not!
If we assume that the Census is just as IT deficient as other bureaucracies how likely is it that they would be able to deal with the crush of people filling out web forms? If a person tries to fill out a web form but the server chokes under the load how likely are they to come back and try again?
As to the federal budget – of course you can download it all in wonderful pdf format. But Congress critters still need that prop of a printed book to show how thick/how many pages it is.
Much more dramatic than telling folks that the budget is now up to 31.14159 megabytes!!
There are several problems that need to be addressed. First, not everybody has or even wants to use the internet. Since it is not a universal medium, you are stuck with the one we have left, paper. The other issue for going digital is more of a hacking issue. Coding and setting it up not to get the ballots faked is difficult, and just as prone to errors as paper. So while a digital solution would be nice, and for many preferrable, it would take a lot of setup time and resources that they can more easily devote to paper and basic manpower hitting the streets.
That’s all we need is an electronically transmitted census that no one trusts. The raw data should be entered on paper; just as we learned from touch screen voting.