Political Column: Census

If you look hard enough, particularly on the Internet, you’ll find at least one person or a group of people who will oppose even the most ordinary of things. There are groups online for people who hate things like salt, paper and deer, among hundreds of other miscellaneous things that really don’t deserve an opposition.

The same is true for everything that has even the slightest political undertones. The U.S. census falls under this last category.

The census became a congressional mandate after the American Revolution and has been taken every 10 years since 1790, with the next one scheduled for April of this year. The purpose is for political analysts to further understand the U.S. population and allocate billions of dollars in federal funding to areas that need it. Perhaps most importantly, it reshapes congressional districts in states, determining electoral voting for the following 10 years.

It’s mind-numbingly simple. Fill in your information and mail it to the return address. That’s all you have to do.

But more often than not people won’t believe things that really are as simple as they appear. As with most things government-oriented, there’s a virulent amount of mistrust surrounding the census among some groups. Several politicans, including often criticized Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann, toss around the idea of not filling the census out, arguing that the government has no right to extract information from people who are not willing to give it out.

For those who simply do not fill the census out, be it because of their concerns for privacy and confidentiality or because they don’t want to have the government involved in their lives any more than it already is, there are penalties. Fines for not complying range from $100 – 1,000  and even possible imprisonment. So if there are people who honestly believe that the government — which is under constitutional law to never reveal the information submitted by U.S. citizens — will round them up in some odd 1984, Big Brother-style futuristic prison camp, then it’s their loss.

The truth is that the census is about as invasive as Facebook, maybe even less. But because there’s a government hand on it, people will oppose it. And like most things following the tinge of conspiracy theories, arguing against the census makes little or no difference. Honestly, some things are actually as simple as they seem.