Finding out who counts:
Rabinove, Samuel
FINDING OUT WHO COUNTS WHY THE NUMBERS MATTER In Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers decreed that there should be a count of "the whole number of free persons" in the...
...The issue of undercounting continues to cause intense controversy, most recently over the number of people who are in the country illegally...
...The Reagan administration said no, and the Bush administration has echoed that line...
...Not only homeless people but many low-income minorities are not on postal lists and are easily overlooked...
...Both power and money are at stake...
...The Commerce Department's view has been that such a change would only confuse the public, undermine the credibility of the census, and lead to charges of political tampering, an accusation that would harm the Census Bureau's image of remaining above partisan squabbles...
...They also contend that the corrected population numbers would be the product of a pioneering statistical technique that does not draw unanimous support from demographers...
...To the extent possible, however, the bureau has always included such persons and will do so in 1990...
...Trial of the suit is expected to begin this summer...
...Every ten years the government would hire census enumerators to do the job...
...District Court in Brooklyn last November to compel the Commerce Department to adjust the results of the 1990 census to account for people inadvertently missed...
...Should population totals for blacks, Hispanics, and others be adjusted upward in census totals to reflect the reality that millions of people simply cannot be found by normal census methods...
...Meantime, the dispute over the counting of illegal aliens continues...
...Bailar had previously opposed making such adjustments on the ground that there was then no adequate means for accomplishing it with accuracy...
...For blacks, the undercount was between 5 and 6 percent and for Hispanics it was only slightly lower...
...Finally, census enumerators, fearful for their own safety, sometimes refuse to enter buildings in low-income neighborhoods...
...when it was finished, the counters would disband...
...It was not until 1902 that Congress decided to create a permanent Bureau of the Census...
...The heart of the matter is who gets counted and who doesn 't...
...This involves taking an independent second count of a sample of geographic areas...
...The Census Bureau estimated that in 1980 there were some 3 to 4 million undocumented aliens residing in the U.S., of which it was able to count about 2 million...
...The Census Bureau acknowledges that it is simply unable to count everyone...
...Census figures form the basis for allotting seats in state legislatures and votes in the electoral college in presidential years as well as fixing the number of representatives each state will have in Congress...
...Barbara A. Bailar, a twenty-nine-year Census Bureau veteran and its former associate director for research in the Reagan administration, says the decision not to adjust 1990 census figures to compensate for minority undercount is a "purely political decision" that is "dressed up in technical language...
...In January Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N...
...Demographers claim that if aliens were fully tallied Connecticut, Kansas, and Pennsylvania would be likely to lose seats in the House, while Texas, California, and New York probably would gain seats...
...FINDING OUT WHO COUNTS WHY THE NUMBERS MATTER In Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers decreed that there should be a count of "the whole number of free persons" in the country every ten years...
...In practice, however, many people fall through the cracks, especially in urban areas...
...It is worth noting that Ms...
...Those who don't return them are supposed to get a personal visit from a census enumerator...
...Conference of Mayors urged Congress to order the Census Bureau to make the adjustments...
...Bailar's shift on the question was instrumental in the decision to bring the new lawsuit...
...The principal technique is called "dual-system estimation...
...Last year the U.S...
...For these and other big cities, the government's decision not to compensate statistically for undercounted minorities has major economic effects, for population and income data are the basis for dispensing more than $30 billion in federal grants to states and municipalities for housing, education, transportation, environmental protection, and other services...
...George Washington believed that the first census gave the country a count that was short of the real numbers...
...The current question is what, if anything, ought to be done about this in the 1990 census...
...Others in Congress have supported the Census Bureau's view that excluding aliens from the count is unconstitutional, and most congressional observers believe that legislation to bar the count of such persons has little chance of enactment...
...Because most members of racial minorities tend to vote Democratic, some congressional Democrats agree with her that partisanship determined the administration's decision...
...But people who care about justice should certainly hope so...
...The bureau's primary role has not changed, but its scope has grown enormously...
...Despite the census pledge of confidentiality, many undocumented aliens want nothing to do with government, and multiple families crowded into a single apartment against the rules are often reluctant to list the real number of occupants...
...Often enough in the ensuing decades that simple provision has led to conflict...
...In recent years, statisticians have developed and refined certain techniques to correct the census for undercount...
...Accordingly, a group of civic organizations (including the U.S...
...She has since told a congressional committee that the determination not to make an adjustment would raise serious questions about the fairness and objectivity of the census...
...Conference of Mayors and the NAACP), cities (New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago), and states (New York and California) filed suit in U.S...
...It strikes the court as absurd," said the decision, "to suggest that a disproportionate loss of political representation will not necessarily follow in the wake of the miscount...
...Census Bureau officials say that "playing with the numbers" would open a statistical can of worms...
...Cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles would gain clout in their state legislatures...
...According to some experts, California could gain at least one seat in the House in the 1990s if blacks, and Asians were counted with the same accuracy as whites...
...By extrapolating from this third sample, the population of the nation as a whole as well as the count for specific geographic areas and for racial and ethnic groups can be projected...
...introduced legislation to do so...
...The persons identified in this "post-enumeration survey" are then matched with the persons tallied in the original census, producing a third and more accurate estimate of the population of those areas...
...Administration officials maintain that manufacturing new population figures after the basic census is run amounts to "numbers shopping...
...She was, in fact, the chief government witness in an earlier unsuccessful lawsuit by New York City over the 1980 census results...
...The 1790 count required 650 enumerators and cost $44,000...
...SAMUEL RABINOVE...
...Some politicians insist that "illegal aliens" are not entitled to be counted...
...Most people receive census questionnaires by mail...
...Further, they say, alternate adjustment formulas could produce radically different numbers...
...Then as now, census results had political effects, since the main purpose of the census is to apportion membership in the House of Representatives...
...Y.) and Congressman Ronald Dellums (D-Calif...
...It remains to be seen whether the plaintiffs will prevail...
...The suit includes an affidavit from Barbara Bailar, the former Census Bureau official, who asserts that the department's decision not to adjust for an undercount is arbitrary and "sub-stantively flawed...
...counting such people, they say, deprives American citizens of the full weight of their votes...
...But many outside experts, including a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, insist that a substantially accurate adjustment can be made...
...But after years of research on the question she not only changed her position but resigned from the Census Bureau over the issue...
...Some members of Congress wish to exclude all aliens from the 1990 count...
...The same is true, however, of the Moynihan-Dellums proposal that would require the Census Bureau to adjust its results for an undercount...
...In April, Judge Joseph M. McLaughlin refused a Commerce Department request for dismissal, based on the contention that the plaintiff had no grounds to sue...
...The officials sketch a scenario where two sets of population figures-unadjusted and adjusted-could emerge for every locality, each with its own advocates...
...Today, census data also affect distribution of federal grants to localities, raising issues of justice as well as power...
...While Census Bureau officials who support the administration's position concede that an adjustment formula, developed since the 1980 census, would improve census accuracy, they maintain that applying the formula would require time-consuming surveys and computer runs, and that the bureau might not be able to deliver state population totals to the president, as required by law, by the December 31, 1990 deadline...
...In 1980, it says, the overall population was undercounted by between 1 and 2 percent...
...From its inception, the decennial census has triggered complaints...
...SAMUEL RABINOVEso...
...The first twelve censuses, beginning in 1790, were all done by temporary help...
...the forthcoming 1990 census has a budget of $2.6 billion and will add 480,000 temporary employees to the permanent roster of 5,000...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 12
