Three rural Georgia communities are the first in the U.S. to challenge the accuracy of their 2020 census numbers. Experts say the pandemic and a lack of reliable broadband may have led to discrepancies in Chester, Glennville and White County.
, and prisons and nursing homes went into lockdowns when those residents were supposed to be counted.
to accept challenges for dorms, military barracks, nursing homes and prisons. The local officials in Georgia aren’t waiting around. “It’s not that they did anything wrong. It was just an oversight. You had to take into account we had COVID and people weren’t allowed in or out,” Stan Dansby, Glennville’s city manager, said of the prison.
“Unlike many areas of the country, Georgia was seeing extremely high cases of COVID-19,” Feldman said in an email. “Unlike the metro areas where population is dense, door-to-door census counters may not have gone to harder to reach areas of rural counties.”