When officials in Chester, Georgia, heard that the 2020 census had pegged their small town at 525 people, their jaws dropped.
. They believed the town was almost triple that size and feared an inaccurate number could force them to make budget cuts.
In the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, White County officials were stunned when the 2020 census said the county had 28,003 residents. A Census Bureau estimate from 2019 had put the county's population at 30,798. The county is home to the town of Helen, a tourist draw modeled on a Bavarian alpine village.
Both Glennville and Chester are home to state prisons, which became among the most difficult places to count — along with college dorms, nursing homes and military barracks — as the coronavirus spread throughout the U.S. during crucial weeks for the census in the spring of 2020. Students were sent home from campuses, and prisons and nursing homes went into lockdowns when those residents were supposed to be counted.
In Glennville, where more than a third of the population is Black, the 2020 census counted 3,834 people. The 2019 estimates said there were 5,066 people, and Glennville officials say the 2020 number should be more than 5,300 residents because they believe the 1,500 or so inmates at Smith State Prison weren't counted.
“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." In the case of Chester, about halfway between Atlanta and Savannah, the 2020 census said it had only 525 people, which would mark a 67% decline in the population over the decade if it were true. The 2019 American Community Survey pegged the majority-Black town's population at 2,102 residents, and city officials believe it has a minimum of 1,500 inhabitants.
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