Digital Census 2020: How the US Census Bureau is surveying 330M people in a pandemic

How do you survey 330 million people across 4M square miles?  

Every 10 years: the United States government is constitutionally required to take a census, which then gets used as the basis for distributed hundreds of billions of tax dollars.  

In 2010, doing the census cost $12 billion. They printed 17 million pages of paper maps and 50 million paper questionnaires.   

In 2020, the Census Bureau is going digital in 59 languages. Good timing too: COVID-19 happened, and the Census Bureau had to cut back some of their door-to-door surveying.  

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the US Census Bureau live on the 2020 digital census ... what kind of technology do you need to build for that? What's the required capacity? How do you secure it all? How do you protect it from bots and hacking?   

And, how do you run a census during Coronavirus shutdowns?