Census 2022: why the INDEC is taking longer than expected to release the figures

In response to Clarín ‘s query, after 5 pm this Thursday -almost 24 hours after the closure of the operation-, the response from INDEC was: “We are receiving the data from the provinces for the final consistency that can give us the number of how many we are. Remember that the Census is not the same as the process of disseminating electoral results”.

The expectation for the dissemination of the data began when the director of INDEC, Marco Lavagna, said on Wednesday afternoon at a press conference that the first data would be communicated that same night or, failing that, this Thursday morning. Later, those sayings were relativized by the organization’s spokesmen.

Between that initial announcement and the subsequent silence, President Alberto Fernández visited the headquarters of INDEC, a decentralized technical body that must guarantee the transparency of public statistics.

Clarín asked if the INDEC was in a position to communicate the basic data of the census. That is: how many people live in Argentina today and, of that amount, how many were men, women, or of another gender. For the rest of the information, we will have to wait longer.

One of the doubts was since the census will continue for six more days, how faithful the figures that are communicated at this time can be. According to Lavagna, the number of people who could not be registered on Wednesday was marginal, but he did not give specific figures to know its size.

It was officially known that in Rosario, for example, 10 percent of the people had not been registered. Whether this proportion is an exception or a pattern applicable to other locations in the country is also unknown, since there were no national details in this regard. Until now, the public data released corresponds to the digital census, in which more than 50 percent of the population would have participated. In the case of the City of Buenos Aires, as reported by INDEC to Clarín, until yesterday that proportion had been 62 percent.

Even though there was a broad response from the population to respond to the census virtually, the inconveniences during the face-to-face day due to the lack of census takers and a delayed start of the operation due to technical problems complicated the scenario. Clarín also asked how many people had continued to respond to the census online today and how many calls had been received to 0800 from people who had been waiting for the census taker on Wednesday without being visited. But that concern also had no answer.