alt Hacker News> Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.
I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.
Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.
Replies
>And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.
There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.
The last thing people should support is creating of profiles of individuals by combining data from different government agencies. This is why the census is so important as a data collection mechanism.
The census doesn't collect party affiliations.
https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting/about/faq...
> the CPS Voting and Registration Supplement does not ask any questions of a partisan nature.