It appears the U.S. Census Bureau will have an additional month to count the entire population of the country following a Thursday ruling by a federal judge.

The decision to extend the enumeration to Oct. 31, though, could be appealed to reinstate the Sept. 30 deadline the Trump Administration is seeking.

The preliminary injunction granted by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in California states the shortened schedule ordered by the administration likely would produce inaccurate results that would last a decade.

The judge sided with civil rights groups and local governments that sued the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the statistical agency, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the counting ends this month.

Despite concerns raised by top Census Bureau officials about the shortened schedule, the Trump Administration failed to consider its duty to produce an accurate head count and neglected to adequately explain a reason for it, she said.

Koh said inaccuracies produced from a shortened schedule would affect the distribution of federal funding and political representation over the next 10 years. The census is used to determine how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed each year and how many congressional seats each state gets.

It isn’t too late to respond to the census by phone, internet or mail, and census enumerators are still working in the region to count people who did not respond on their own.

It is important to count every single person in the region, because those population numbers will be used for the next decade to determine how much money the area receives in federal programming.

The count also shapes how seats in the U.S. Congress are distributed.

Read more in Sunday’s Vindicator.