I tried checking online to see if the my2020census site is a known scam and I found several sites that assured me it’s legit. But quite frankly, those sites look more questionable than the letter I received. And it seems to me that if some organization was able to set up one site for an online phishing scam, it would have no problem setting up a few other fake sites to tell people it was legit.
So is this a legitimate alternative site that the government set up for some obscure reason? Or is it a scam?
Not a scam. If you go to 2020census.gov and click where it says “Take the Census” it will take you to the place that my2020census.gov will also take you to. The questions do not require you to reveal any financial information, although you have to put in your birth date.
I got the notice and went and filled out the census right away. Now I’m getting another one, but I tossed the first one and don’t know if it’s a duplicate or what.
Oh well, they’re going to need to redo it after the mess we’re in anyway. Numbers might be very different in a few months.
Literally the same exact thing happened to me. Got the first one, did it online and threw away the card. Got a second one and I have no idea if the numbers are the same. I threw that one away too.
The “.gov” is key. There are restrictions on who can get a “.gov” domain and sometimes somebody finds a workaround for a little while, but generally you can trust them.
I got the form. Did some Googling. And from the 2020census.gov web site found a link to the my2020census.gov site and filled it in.
(Surprisingly short, in my case. YMMV. OTOH, they insisted I fill in the extraction thing. Look, we don’t have easyily pegged extraction in many cases and some people have no idea. Just let people leave it blank. Better yet don’t ask. Why does the government need this at all? I’ve done a lot of family genealogy and a simple “Where were you born?” helps much more.)
You can’t leave the ancestry questions blank, but there is an option on both of them for “prefer not to say”.
And did you notice that the two mailings were in different shapes of envelope? I think they’re planning on some set of people who automatically throw out envelopes of the “wrong” shape as junk mail (and which shape is the “wrong” shape could vary from person to person).
It’s hard enough to get an accurate census that I’m all in favor of any tricks they can use to make it more accurate.
Maybe it depends on your browser? Using Firefox on a Windows machine I left it blank and hit submit. It returned the same page with the left-blank area highlighted red. I hit submit again and it accepted it.
It’s not that I prefer not to say, but rather I do not know or care.
I printed my confirmation page. I found it odd that it included the sentence:
I have a feeling multiple mailings were inadvertently sent out.
For the ancestry/extraction, I’m “English, Irish, German, Swedish, French”. I typed that exact phrase into the box, and it accepted it. I’m a bit happy about that; as a 3+ decade amateur genealogist, I’ve spent a lot of time going over Census records looking for both primary and interesting data (like occupation). Hopefully that bit of info will be useful to someone 70+ years from now.
Where I was born is nowhere remotely near where either of my parents was born; neither physically nor culturally.
And giving only the place of birth for my parents would be drastically misleading as to their ethnicity. Come to think of it, it would be misleading as to mine, also.
Place of birth may be useful in your own family for asking a question about ethnicity; but it doesn’t work for a lot of other people.
ETA: whether the government actually needs to know about ethnicity is a whole different question. There are good reasons and potentially bad reasons for them to want to. I expect to fill mine in honestly, however.
I tried to fill it out, but when I clicked on the start button, nothing happened. Just nothing, not the indication that it was trying to connect that I have gotten so familiar with from TSD, but nothing at all. Perhaps because from a foreign address, but I thought they wanted to tally ex-pats.
