 Hi, thanks for joining us. I'm Joshua Montanari Education Specialist at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library Museum Today I'm presenting electing our presidents who counts the electoral process and the US Census I'm gonna start with our current constitutional vocabulary word of the day Numeration which is the action of establishing the number of something use it in a sentence you say The actual enumeration Shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States And within every subsequent term of ten years in such manner as they shall by law direct That's at least according to article one section two of the United States Constitution Which also tells us no capitation or other direct tag shall be laid unless in proportion to the census or enumeration You're in before directed to be taken Basically telling us our taxes will be based on the needs of our population So the census is something that counts things and enumeration There's actually different kinds Of censuses that are carried out On being the census of agriculture It's kind of like planning dinner for the country five years in advance Which is how often it's taken It is an exclusive source of uniform comprehensive and impartial agricultural data for every county in the nation It helps farmers make informed decisions about their operations now and in the future to make sure we all have food on our tables There's also an economic census So we can check in once in a while and see how's that nation business It's conducted every five years as well That is collected from four million business locations relied upon by nation for economic development business decisions policy makers strategic planning It's a statistical benchmark for our current economic activity And it can actually show how healthy our democracy is Which believe it or not research tells us hinges on median income of americans when it gets below a certain level democracy's chances of survival go way down. So this is very important to our american democracy But the census Most of us are concerned with is the decennial census of population and housing That's the one that counts us like you see the gentleman in the photograph there from the national archives It's carried out by the u.s. Census Bureau every 10 years since 1790 It counts every resident in the united states regardless of status The responses are strictly confidential And the census evolves with america more or less shows us a mirror And it's been checked by the judicial branch over time which helps with that evolution They've ruled that the population headcount Is not the only thing the census can do hence those other kinds of census that we saw Like economic and agricultural In morales versus daily a federal district court ruled the census does not violate The fourth amendment which is our right to privacy as the information collected is confidential This was affirmed by u.s. Court of Appeals And the supreme court basically describes our census as the linchpin of the federal statistical system But that view has changed over time We go back between 1790 1860 Much like the nation we had a separate and unequal census One that counted enslaved constituents ones that couldn't vote that had no rights But still counted as two-thirds of a person to boost support for slavery in congress That ends with passage of the 14th amendment. There's a catalyst for counting the whole person regardless of race But after slavery we had segregation as demonstrated by these two primary sources from the national archives on the left You see what was called at that time the negro section of counting the census on the right We see the white section They're also evolved with our innovation from manual counts to digitization You see a patent For a compiling a statistic machine So the right of that we see a digital advertisement to fulfill the census online This has obviously increased our capacity and efficiency in carrying out enumeration We have a variety of data products available And it's obviously expanded accessibility which I can vouch for I completed my 2020 census online from the comfort of my home It's evolved with our cultural diversity It accommodates English speakers of other languages of which we have 60 million u.s residents in the united states or eso l 4.9 million of those are students in our public schools learning english And online census content is now available in 59 languages But what does it do Well, the census hits home It brings billions in federal aid to your state for things like medicaid medicare community development It determines what your school district receives and state aid for education and their school meal program funding It determines your state's number of us house members and your town's number of state legislatures Ultimately it determines your state's number of electoral college votes in the presidential election You're thinking of throwing your hat in the ring for the presidential election. It might verify your eligibility To run We know you have to be 35 years old A natural born citizen and have maintained residency in the united states for at least 14 years Here we could see some evidence. Jimmy Carter might have used when he threw his hat in the ring for president in the 1976 election It verifies jimmy carter's place of birth as georgia confirms his age at the last birthday And it shows established residency on us soil for more than 14 years Now electing our president here's some census electoral math jimmy carter and any other president who's won The office of the white house would have had to accomplish a person running for president has to win the most electoral votes The electoral votes are a combination of a number of us house members Plus two us senators that every state has How do we determine us house members? Well, we just mentioned that with the census We have on average about one us house member assigned per 720,000 people That's just an average. It's different in different places of the country And as mentioned the constitution gives each state two us senators no matter how many people reside there The candidate with the most votes in each state wins all of its electoral votes One could say the winner of the presidential election has won a majority of majorities If we break it down into an equation There are 538 total electoral votes at stake You need 270 to win And that's just one added for a majority To show a case study here in georgia in 2010 the us census recorded 9,687,653 georgians We divide that by the 720,000 average ratio We get 13.5 us house members naturally, we cannot have half of a Representative so we round that up to 14 us house members And as you may have seen in the election this year georgia has 16 very critical Electoral votes with those 14 house members and two us senators So who counts? well, technically everybody in america does Every person counts Ineligible voters like people under the age of 18 They still count towards the allocation of us house members and their state's number of electoral votes They determine Critical data for policymakers economists Farmers and many others that impact our lives every single day And being counted in the census is probably the easiest civic duty anyone to fulfill Now if you'd like further inquiry To the census and resources available check out the carter library teacher resources page Where this presentation will be available so you can access all of those embedded hyperlinks Check out the carter library youtube channel the national archives educator resources The us census bureau to see what other information they may have Docs teach can give you a few more primary sources on this topic And check out the presidential primary sources project on youtube who was our generous host For this video today, so thank you very much. I hope you learned something new about the census and the electoral process. Take care