The U.S. Supreme Court has stopped the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident from continuing through the end of October.
The court Tuesday said the 2020 census should be stopped. The Trump administration argued that the head count needed to end immediately so the U.S. Census Bureau had enough time to crunch the numbers before a congressionally mandated year-end deadline for turning in figures used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets.
A coalition of local governments and civil rights groups had sued the Trump administration, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the count ended early.
Montanans lagged behind the rest of the country responding to the census by mail, phone and internet, with a 60 percent “self response rate,” compared to the national 67 percent. However, after followup from census workers, the Bureau reports 99.9 percent of Montanans were counted.