By Herald Staff

Census data collecting will continue to Oct. 31.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, issued an order instructing the U.S. Census Bureau to send to census takers a message to that effect.

The bureau sent the message on Friday. It read: “As a result of court orders, the October 5, 2020 target date is not operative, and data collection operations will continue through October 31, 2020. Employees should continue to work diligently and enumerate as many people as possible. Contact your supervisor with any questions.”

The Census Bureau was also updating 2020Census.gov and Census.gov and all external and internal guidance to ensure compliance with the orders, according to a note the bureau released to the media on Friday.

Koh’s order on Thursday confirmed that people can still answer the questionnaire and census takers can still knock on doors through Oct. 31.

Bureau officials had announced that the collection of census information would end this past Monday, despite an injunction issued by Koh at the end of September that suspended a Sept. 30 deadline for ending the head count and a Dec. 31 deadline for turning in numbers used to determine how many congressional seats each state gets in a process known as apportionment. By doing this, the deadlines reverted back to the end of October for ending the head count and the end of April for turning in counts for the apportionment.