Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
If you haven’t filled out your census yet, please do it sooner rather than later.
Same with voting this fall. I suggest you vote early or in-person, despite the pandemic.
The deadline to fill out your census form, so you and your family can be counted and your community can benefit, has been moved up a month. There’s no acceptable justification for it, just another lowdown attempt by the Trump administration to give privileged white people the majority advantage for just a little longer, as America becomes a more colorized nation.
We don’t need the census to tell us what we already know, that our nation is becoming more diverse. And diversity is a good thing, even for the white majority, if we embrace it. We can either celebrate our plurality and make it our strength, or we can go the other way and keep fighting over real and imagined differences.
What we do need the census for is in apportionments. If New Mexico, for example, doesn’t get a complete count of its residents, it could lose badly needed federal funding.
That’s a very real possibility for New Mexicans. The most recent data show New Mexico is the second worst state in the union in its self-response rate, only ahead of Alaska. Nationally, an estimated 63.1% of the American residents have taken it upon themselves to fill out and send in, through the mail or online, their household census, while only 53.6% of New Mexico’s residents have done so.
So now is the time for census workers to get out there and go door-to-door to flesh out the remainder of America’s population. But that door-knocking has been hampered by pandemic and fear. COVID-19 has limited mobility, encouraged isolation and slowed collections, while Trump’s effort last year to insert an unnecessary citizenship question into the census has put a cloud over the neutrality of the census.
Is it any wonder people of color would be less likely to fill out their census? The pandemic is hitting them harder and Trump has been trying to relegate them to second-class status for years now. The likelihood that New Mexico will be among the states to suffer the most on the decade ahead should come as no surprise because, well, we’re a minority-majority state.
Meanwhile, Trump has also made it clear that he’d like to sabotage the vote count — he essentially said so the other day, before walking back his words. He said he’d like to hold up some additional funding for the U.S. Postal Service because he doesn’t want too many people voting by mail. He’s been calling universal mail-in voting “rigged” without any evidence to back up his claims, while there is plenty of evidence that he’s trying to undermine the legitimacy of the election itself.
I wonder how people will feel about Trump messing with postal operations if their Social Security check gets delayed. Or how about when their prescription medicines are slower in arriving by mail?
But just to be on the safe side, I won’t be voting by mail. I’ll be donning my mask, social distancing and voting early or in-person on election day. Then I’ll pray for a Biden-Harris landslide, so Trump will have no room to contest and steal the election, and our future.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:
