More than one in three Texas County residents failed to return their census questionnaires by Friday’s official deadline, the Census Bureau said.
More forms were expected to be received over the weekend. Census workers will not begin going door to door until May 1 to count people who did not return their questionnaires by mail.
As of early Friday, the mail participation rate was 65 percent in Texas County. The mail participation rate, which the bureau is using this year for the first time, is the percentage of forms mailed back by households that received them.
Rates for communities in Texas County: Houston, 68; Cabool, 68; Licking, 58; Raymondville, 61; Summersville, 66; and Plato, 61.
Unlike the mail response rate, which the census used in earlier counts, it excludes forms returned by the postal service as undeliverable, often because a house or apartment was vacant.
Final rates for this year’s national count will not be posted until early May, so it was unclear whether this year’s unprecedented publicity and marketing campaigns had reversed a decades-long decline. On Saturday, it was estimated about 70 percent of the country had responded.