As a nation, we shouldn’t erect barriers to obtaining the most accurate census count possible. That’s why we applaud a federal judge’s ruling to block the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census form.

The chilling impact of this question can be the difference between whether Texas and our local communities get their fair share of federal dollars and other services. And it’s not easy for local communities to make up funding gaps that wouldn’t exist or would be smaller if the count were accurate.

Texas has never been an easy state to count. Many residents speak languages other than English, move frequently, live in hard-to-reach rural areas, worry about privacy or distrust the government. After the last census in 2010, the bureau’s after action review found that about 66 percent of the state’s residents, including 85 percent of Texas Hispanics, live in census tracts that exceed the national average for low-response scores.

The administration says asking about citizenship will help the government protect voting rights and better gauge immigration. It plans to ask the Supreme Court to quickly review the lower court’s ruling ahead of an approaching deadline for the Census Bureau to finalize census forms.

The founders considered the census to be so important to our representative democracy that the requirement to perform a basic count of people is in the Constitution. It is our civic duty to participate in the count and the federal government’s responsibility to carry out a constitutional mandate to the best possible result.

The 2020 census will shape politics and the distribution of funds for a decade. Let’s not impose an impediment to obtaining a fair and just count.