The Digital Divide Promises to Skew Census Results

The digital divide means that a digital census raises new problems when it comes to counting correctly. Approximately 22 percent of households nationwide still don’t have home broadband, which means they’ll have a harder time responding to an online census. Even among those who have home broadband, people of color and low-income families are more likely to depend exclusively on mobile internet. Mobile is certainly better than nothing, but restrictive data caps and other potential barriers may make it challenging for mobile-only users to respond to an online census. These communities are already more likely to be undercounted than their more economically and racially privileged peers, and digital inequities stand to make the problem worse.

Census 2020 is just one example of critical tools and services, like job applications and applications for federal assistance, that are migrating online — and leaving the disconnected behind. We can’t afford to allow systemic racism and monopolistic cable companies to keep poor people and communities of color offline, stranded by artificially high prices and nonexistent competition.