Techwire Takeaways
• Officials are planning to thwart disinformation campaigns.
• They’ve talked with federal census officials about data privacy.
• They’ll use new and better tools to ensure everyone is counted.
The event is crucial to ensure that California avoids another undercount and preserves its congressional representation and rightful share of federal funding, state senators and Assembly members agreed during Monday’s Joint Informational Hearing at the California State Capitol, convened by their respective bodies’ select committees on the census. The state has identified 15 million people who “are going to be very difficult to count,” said Marybel Batjer, secretary of the California Government Operations Agency (GovOps), which has been home to the California Complete Count Census 2020 since July 2018.
California accounts for more than 12 percent of the nation’s population — and more than 30 percent of those nationally considered “hard to count.” The state is also home to the nation’s hardest-to-count city and county — both Los Angeles, Batjer added during opening remarks.
But California has increased its census budget and staff exponentially, from $2 million, two full-time employees and three on loan from other departments in 2010 to $100.3 million and funding for 33 staff now — with another $54 million in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for outreach and communications, Batjer said. Officials are planning to guard sensitive information and avoid any potential disruption by bad actors. Among the takeaways:
• State officials have already raised the issue of data privacy with their federal counterparts. Assemblyman Ed Chau, D-Monterey Park, a member of the California Legislative Technology and Innovation Caucus and an author of last year’s California Consumer Privacy Act, asked what officials have done or will do to safeguard that data. Adriana Martinez, deputy director for outreach and tribal liaison for the California Census, said the state has let the federal Census Bureau know it’s expecting more “collateral” aimed at addressing specific district needs, to reassure hard-to-count populations they should trust in the census and be counted.
“We’re going to painstaking lengths to make sure that we’re not collecting personal identifiable information of the people that we’re conducting outreach to," said Justyn Howard, GovOps deputy secretary for census. "But having said that, we’ve engaged quite a bit with the federal government to understand their process. So that we can help with that messaging to our community-based partners, on the grounds that they can then relay that to folks.”
• The state is taking aim at “disinformation” in its recent census media RFP. California has $16.1 million allocated for its census media campaign, with another $30 million requested in Newsom’s budget, and published its RFP for media support on Friday, with the goal of announcing awards in June and starting the contract at the end of that month. But Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Los Angeles, questioned preparations.
“How are we preparing for dealing with cybersecurity, fake news, bots — I mean, there’s a hypersensitivity around what people see and believe to be true on social media. Some of those platforms have less credibility now with certain communities, so how are we preparing for that?” Kamlager-Dove said.
Part of the census media RFP includes a requirement “related to disinformation campaigns,” and what a respondent would do to respond rapidly to a reported incident, Howard, said, noting the state is also looking at other techniques from community-based organizations (CBOs) to ensure the swift reporting of such incidents.
• Officials are bringing new technology to bear in hopes of avoiding an undercount, Batjer said in response to a statement from Kamlager-Dove that she hoped the state had stopped “hitting our head against the same wall,” in terms of repeating strategies that may have led to an undercount.
“We have new tools this year that we’ve never had before, that are much more precise, right down into the neighborhoods of the hard-to-count areas. So, we can rapidly deploy people once we have the understanding,” Batjer said.
“You have new tools, but you also have new dangers,” Kamlager-Dove said.
“Yes, we do. Dark media is very frightening and we’re going to do rapid deployment around dark media as well,” Batjer said. She described the overall goal as “creating a repeatable process” to make the 2030 census easier.
• The state is evaluating proposals from statewide CBOs to assist in population outreach, in response to an RFP, and it anticipates announcing awards Friday.
