The 2020 Census is important because responses help determine congressional representation for each state, and guide how billions of dollars in public, private, and not-for-profit resources are distributed across the country for the next 10 years. Those funds are used for critical services like emergency response, fire departments, schools, health care, and transportation.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s goal is a complete and accurate count of every person living in this country as of April 1, 2020. To do that, we have to reach everyone. In many ways, the 2020 Census will be our nation’s largest civic engagement effort ever.
Counting everyone in a country as vast and diverse as ours is complex—so we will offer many options. For the first time, you can choose to respond to the census online, over the phone, or on paper through the mail. If you do not respond in one of those ways, we’ll visit your residence to collect your information in person. We also undertake several operations designed for people living in special situations, such as villagers living in remote Alaska, people experiencing homelessness, communities recovering from natural disasters, and college dorm residents and others living in group quarters.
Our online response option is designed to make it easy for the public to securely respond to the 2020 Census. The ability to respond online anywhere is a tremendous help to those doing outreach to encourage a complete and accurate count.
We have worked hard to ensure our technology is safe, secure, and easy to use for everyone. To make sure our systems work for this extensive count, we took several steps.
We also want to make sure we keep our site up and running if the unforeseen does happen. We developed and built two secure data collection systems. We designed them to be modular so that either system could fully substitute for the other. Both have been tested thoroughly for their capacity. We modeled how many people in America might access the online response site at any one time. Then we tested both systems to see if they could handle many multiples that level. Both systems successfully handled the predicted levels and well above. Accordingly, we will make use of both. Redundancy allows us to have a backup system should there be any reason to swap one of these systems out.
In addition to our two strong systems, we have the ability to quickly add capacity because we are cloud-capable. In the case of major outages, we have designed redundancies for our data operations and we have contingency plans in place that have been drilled over and over again.
Redundancy and resilience are central to all our operations.
The success of the 2020 Census depends on your trust in its safety and your understanding of its importance. Your participation is vital, which means your trust in us is vital. The 2020 Census is not just our mission; it is something that belongs to all of us.
Visit 2020census.gov to learn more about the 2020 Census – how to respond, and why it matters.