January 18, 2024 at 2:47 pm

Woman Has Been Stalked By The U.S. Census’ American Community Survey For A Decade Because She’s Classified As “Defective”

by Matthew Gilligan

That’s a loooooooong time to be harassed by someone…or by an organization.

But a woman named Tara put a group called American Community Survey (ACS) on blast in a viral TikTok video for what she says was inappropriate behavior for years.

She said, “Imagine you get a letter in the mail saying that if you don’t answer all the questions in the survey, that you’re gonna be punished by law.”

Tara told viewers that she answered questions about how much money she had, what kind of electronics she owns, and specific questions about how she gets to work and how long her house is empty for when she’s away working.

She said, “It sounds rather invasive and probably like a scam, so you probably choose not to fill out the survey, right?”

Tara added, “If they don’t get you to fill it out with the empty threats of legal action, fines, and jail time, they will wear you down because they will call you hundreds of thousands of times, all hours of the day and night. They will show up at your job. They will show up at your home. Every single day, multiple times a day, and I am not exaggerating.”

Tara got suspicious when she kept getting selected for the survey despite living at different properties and said, “Why have you found me at three different properties if it’s just about the property? The odds of that are like 000.1 in a million. It’s, like, so improbable.”

She did some research and found other people who were also harassed. Tara said, “Which led me to this document” which Tara called “kind of the first incarnation of the American Community Survey.”

Tara said that the Census Bureau selects people for the survey with “the three Ds”: defective, dependent, and delinquent.

She said, “Defective, being someone like me. That is an old, outdated, offensive term for people with a disability. Dependent, which is also someone like me, somebody who relies on government assistance or Medicare, Medicaid.”

Tara said she eventually got rid of them because she told the Bureau workers that they were being recorded for a documentary she was making about her ordeal.