Benefits, Burdens, and Prospects of the American Community Survey Summary of a Workshop (2013) / Chapter Skim
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7 Legal and Social Equity Uses of ACS Data
7 Legal and Social Equity Uses of ACS Data
Pages 127-144
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From page 127... ...
Section 7–A summarizes work in using the ACS to implement the Voting Rights Act's provisions for language services for the diverse population of New York City, while Section 7–B describes the ways in which ACS data have been used in legal cases challenging redistricting plans. Expanding the scope to include the ACS's role in monitoring social equity generally, Section 7–C summarizes work on studying disparate impacts in housing.
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From page 128... ...
. With that, the basic task may be restated as deploying language services to election poll sites with high concentrations of Asian Indian members of the CVLEP population.
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From page 129... ...
) : the Director of the Census determines, based on the 2010 American Commu nity Survey census data and subsequent American Community Survey data in 5-year increments, or comparable census data, that -- (i)
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From page 130... ...
, but were not complete. Urdu, the na tional language of Pakistan, is also classified as an Asian Indian language, but only about 13 percent of Queens' Urdu-speaking CVLEP population checked the Asian Indian race category.2 • Because the basic objective is to provide election language services, it is natural to focus on the finest-grained operational unit of electoral geogra phy: the poll site (the actual location at which the language services must 2 Pakistani is one of the explicitly mentioned write-in examples under the "Other Asian" race category, two items below the "Asian Indian" category, in the ACS race question: Person Question 6 on the 2012 questionnaire.
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From page 131... ...
In fact, Queens' poll sites and their coverages are defined so that -- on average -- a poll site is built from parts of about five census tracts. Salvo described the entire Voting Rights Act compliance project as a function of three basic components: ACS data, administrative data, and input from the Asian community.
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From page 132... ...
The result of this task was, for each of the major Asian Indian language groups, poll-site-level estimates of the number of self-identified Asian Indians speaking that language who are also CVLEP. A map of those estimates could then be compared directly with the surname-and-voter-roll-based map for the final step: selecting the poll sites at which to supply language assistance.
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From page 133... ...
• Each county in question has a large Hispanic population, many of whom are immigrants. • Each case depended critically on the special Citizen Voting Age Popula tion (CVAP)
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From page 134... ...
For her second case study, Gobalet described a case in which her firm was engaged to examine four different redistricting scenarios that would partition a county (unnamed) into five supervisor districts; the task was to determine which of the scenarios comply with Voting Rights Act requirements, with the slight complication that Hispanic advocate groups had gravitated toward one particular plan where they sensed the plan would give them the ability to elect Hispanic 3 The CVAP files and support documentation are available at https://www.census.gov/rdo/ data/voting_age_population_by_citizenship_and_race_cvap.html.
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From page 135... ...
, Gobalet found that only two of the plans -- B and C -- included an effective Hispanic majority district, in which the 90 percent confidence interval for the Hispanic CVAP share of the population lies completely above 50 percent. Both Plan B and C included a second district where the confidence interval overlapped 50 percent, suggesting that there might be a second majority Hispanic district (but not necessarily)
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From page 136... ...
Monterey County is subject to U.S. Justice Department preclearance of districting plans under the Voting Rights Act, so she conducted this work in the context of evaluating two alternative districting plans partitioning the county into five districts -- one developed by county authorities (and ultimately adopted)
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From page 137... ...
between various racial and ethnic groups, and analysis is even more powerful using the ACS PUMS data to tailor areas to the question of interest and choose how the tabulation is done; the frequency of ACS releases also make it preferable to the once-a-decade long form. Hence, as Gobalet did before him, Beveridge stated up front his view that -- were the ACS to go away -- the types and the richness of disparate impact analysis that are now possible for understanding housing conditions would be impossible.
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From page 138... ...
A next step in the analysis was to compare the composition of the Section 8 housing choice voucher waiting list for Kenosha County with the underlying demographics of the county as reflected in the 2005–2009 ACS PUMS data. Beveridge concluded that the disparate impact of getting into new Section 8 housing is fairly evident: the number of non-Hispanic blacks on the voucher wait list represents almost 75 percent of the non-Hispanic black population of Kenosha County as a whole, while wait-listed non-Hispanic whites make up just under 3 percent of the county's total non-Hispanic white population.
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From page 139... ...
He said that he distinctly recalls getting a phone call shortly after the release of detailed data from the 2000 census, from a Times reporter with a curious question: "What's going on with the 59 people that live in Central Park? " The reporter had noticed, amidst the census block counts, that population total corresponding to the park; the reporter called the Census Bureau for clarification, and said that the Bureau staff did not have a good answer to the question.
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From page 140... ...
began by commending the presenters for what she called a strong set of presentations on issues that all, in some form, tie back to the original purpose of the census itself. The constitutional mandate for the decennial census is to fairly allocate representation through apportionment and, later, redistricting; through the long series of Supreme Court cases on redistricting and the enactment of related law like the Voting Rights Act, issues of ensuring social equity -- fairness in representation writ large -- have emerged as major uses of census data, so it is good to see the ACS data satisfying the same mandates.
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From page 141... ...
Again, Lowenthal suggested, a missing step in the logic is that "they [the Census Bureau] really don't care when you leave the house and when you get home"; they're asking the question to get a sense of when roads in the vicinity might experience peak traffic and when transportation routes are being most (and least)
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From page 142... ...
that are essential to responding to congressional mandates are going to be "more powerful arguments for lawmakers than many other things that we can say." Turning to specific questions, Lowenthal asked the panel of presenters the same question that was raised in other discussion sessions -- what would you do, and how would your analyses change, if the ACS were no longer available. Gobalet's presentation had discussed the possibility of Hispanic surnames from voter registration rolls as one possible alternative data source, but -- though those data were workable in the specific Monterey County example she examined -- she concluded that the ACS data were more flexible and ultimately more useful.
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From page 143... ...
Gobalet answered bluntly that her sense is that neither the letter nor the intent of the federal Voting Rights Act -- as currently written and interpreted by the courts -- can be enforced without ACS data. Beveridge replied to Gobalet's point that, unfortunately and ironically, "there are people who would be fine with that." That said, he agreed that -- without the ACS data -- it is simply impossible to accommodate the demographic changes Tsosie referred to with respect to voting.
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From page 144... ...
-- and its recitation about how few cities and counties in Iowa have populations over 20,000 -- with jaw agape; "we have neighborhoods in New York with 30,000 people, 40,000 people." So he conceded being a bit embarrassed to make things sound like an argument for an increased sample in a borough like Queens -- but "the law is the law, and Section 203 implementation requires detail," and that is going to push the limits of the ACS sample even in the densest of areas. He agreed that more effective ways to sample in rural areas need to be considered -- indeed, he said it would be a real death knell for the ACS if the sample in New York City were increased at the expense of rural areas, because the ACS would lose value as purely "an urban area/New York City thing." Lowenthal said that she wanted to raise and put on the table an idea that Ken Hodges (Nielsen)
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