The U.S. Census Bureau has chosen six places to test new ways of collecting data, and two of them are in the Carolinas.
Parts of the Spartanburg, South Carolina, metro area and four western North Carolina counties and the Qualla Boundary, home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, will be part of the test, scheduled to take place in 2026.
The mini-census will help the bureau evaluate strategies for reaching historically under-counted groups, including those in rural and tribal areas and among hard-to-reach urban populations. The goal is to improve the 2030 decennial census questionnaire and the materials the bureau uses to encourage people to fill it out.
The Census Bureau will finish designing the test next year and begin reaching out to residents in the test areas next summer. The test census will take place in the spring and summer of 2026, using April 1, 2026, as a reference date.
The four western North Carolina counties chosen for the test are Cherokee, Graham, Jackson and Swain, all in the mountains. Other test locations across the country include parts of the Colorado Springs and Huntsville, Alabama, metro areas, as well as tribal lands in Arizona and four counties in West Texas.
No one testing area includes all the populations the Census Bureau hopes to reach, said Daniel Doyle, deputy chief of the Decennial Census Management Division.
“It’s the combination that’s powerful,” Doyle said in a written statement. “Together, these sites will enable us to test the improvements we’re designing in our efforts to get a complete count of historically under-counted and hard-to-count populations.”
The bureau says it hopes to make it easier for people to respond to the census online, by phone or by mail as well as improve in-person data collection where necessary.
The national count is required by the U.S. Constitution every 10 years to determine how many representatives each state should have in Congress. The data is also used to determine how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal taxes are distributed among the states.
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