Judge says 2020 census must continue for another month

AP — A federal judge in California has stopped the 2020 census from finishing at the end of September and suspended a year-end deadline for delivering the numbers needed to decide how many seats each state gets in Congress.

On Thursday, a preliminary injunction was granted by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in California, which will allow the count of every U.S. resident to continue through the end of October.

Koh said the shortened schedule for the census would likely produce inaccurate results.

Inaccuracies produced from a shortened schedule would affect the distribution of federal funding and political representation over the next 10 years, Koh said, affecting how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed each year and how many congressional seats each state gets.

The ruling to extend the deadline was made late Thursday two days after hearing arguments from attorneys for the Census Bureau after attorneys for civil rights groups and local governments that had sued the Census Bureau to extend the 2020 Census deadline past September.

Government attorneys argued the census must finish by the end of September to meet a Dec. 31 deadline, to allow adequate timing for how many congressional seats each state gets.

However, Koh’s preliminary injunction suspends that end-of-the-year deadline, too, issuing a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Census Bureau from winding down field operations until she made a ruling in the lawsuit.