WASHINGTON — After a delay of more than four months caused by the pandemic, data from the 2020 census used for drawing congressional and legislative districts will be released next week, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.
The bureau will publicize the data next Thursday, Aug. 12, four days before it had promised in a court agreement with the state of Ohio.
The information was supposed to be released at the end of March but was pushed back to August to give bureau statisticians more time to crunch the numbers, which came in late because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The postponement sent states scrambling to change their redistricting deadlines.
Alabama and Ohio sued the Census Bureau in an effort to get the redistricting data released sooner. As part of a settlement agreement with Ohio, the Census Bureau promised to release the redistricting data no later than Aug. 16 — a date it had previously picked for releasing the numbers in an older format.
The data will be released in a newer format by the end of September.
The redistricting numbers will show where white, Asian, Black and Hispanic communities grew over the past decade. It also will show which areas have gotten older and the number of people living in dorms and nursing homes. The data will cover geographies as small as neighborhoods and as large as states.