After the U.S. Census Bureau released its first round of official 2020 population corrections in January, many states and cities still await action on the bulk of their counting issues and the funding shortfalls those mishaps can cause.
Early winners are those areas where the census had clear technical problems — where mapping issues or uncertain boundaries misplaced prisons in Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee, adding their populations incorrectly to nearby areas.
For instance, Whiteville, Tennessee, had almost 2,000 people restored to its count, a 75% increase from the census count of 2,606, after the population of a prison was added back from a nearby area to which it was mistakenly attributed in 2020, according to Timothy Kuhn, director of the Tennessee State Data Center in Knoxville. The update brought the revised population number to more than 4,500.
