KJZZ is a service of Rio Salado College,
and Maricopa Community Colleges

Copyright © 2025 KJZZ/Rio Salado College/MCCCD
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Tribal lands in Arizona to host practice census in 2026

Census lanyard
Jean Clare Sarmiento/KJZZ
More than 400 additional census workers have been brought into Arizona for September.

Tribal lands in Arizona will be among six places in the West and South to host practice runs for the 2030 U.S. census.

Residents in Texas, Colorado, North and South Carolina and Alabama will also be asked to participate in the test runs scheduled for spring 2026.

The practice counts are expected to help the agency better tally populations that were undercounted in the 2020 census.

The statistical agency hopes the practice counts will help it learn how to better tally populations that were undercounted in the 2020 census; improve methods that will be utilized in 2030; test its messaging, and appraise its ability to process data as it is being gathered, Census Bureau officials said.

“Our focus on hard-to-count and historically undercounted populations was a driver in the site selection,” said Tasha Boone, assistant director of decennial census programs at the Census Bureau.

At the same time, the Census Bureau will send out practice census questionnaires across the U.S. to examine self-response rates among different regions of the country.

The six test sites were picked for a variety of reasons, including a desire to include rural areas where some residents don't receive mail or have little or no internet service; tribal areas; dorms, care facilities or military barracks; fast-growing locations with new construction; and places with varying unemployment rates.

Ahead of the last census in 2020, the only start-to-finish test of the head count was held in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2018. Plans for other tests were canceled because of a lack of funding from Congress.

The Black population in the 2020 census had a net undercount of 3.3%, while it was almost 5% for Hispanics and 5.6% for American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations. The non-Hispanic white population had a net overcount of 1.6%, and Asians had a net overcount of 2.6%, according to the 2020 census results.

The once-a-decade head count determines how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. It also guides the distribution of $2.8 trillion in annual federal spending.

Greg Hahne started as a news intern at KJZZ in 2020 and returned as a field correspondent in 2021. He learned his love for radio by joining Arizona State University's Blaze Radio, where he worked on the production team.
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an independent not-for-profit news organization.