NewsMax.com
Monday, February 12, 2001

Both political parties will be watching the outcome closely. It could wind up determining who controls the House of Representatives in 2003.

That's because the 2000 census results – no matter how on target or off the mark – will be the basis for how the House districts are re-drawn for the 2002 congressional elections.

Due to be made public Wednesday, according to the New York Times, will be the Census Bureau's estimate of the percentage of Americans who may have been ignored in the 2000 nationwide count, or mistakenly tabulated more than once.

It will be more than that, though. It will be also a guess about whether to guess again.

Here's how all this works:

A group of census officials tweaking their data and scratching their heads will, based on all that guesswork, make a recommendation that seems to split liberals and conservatives right down the middle:

Should the bureau statistically adjust its population count based on data from a selected sample of American households? Liberals say, yes, because it might give a higher count to minorities who are more inclined to vote Democratic.

Or should the bureau stick with the (sort of) hard numbers of traditional nose-counts, even though there is evidence some Americans got left out, or were somehow counted twice? George W. Bush in the past has said, yes.

But when the new Republican president was paying a courtesy visit to a Democratic Party congressional retreat recently he was asked a census question he couldn't answer, said it was a subject on which he'd not been briefed.

That question is the one Democratic members of Congress have been so keyed up about:

Will Bush allow social scientists at the Census Bureau to decide on adjustments "without political interference?"

Translation: Does he look kindly upon leftover Census Bureau managers – appointed by the Democratic president, Bill Clinton – making the results come out in accordance with their statistically adjusted sampling methods?

Apparently Bush's answer was supposed to have been a resounding, "No!"

For, shortly thereafter, his White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told the Associated Press that "the president supports an actual head count, because he believes it's the best and the most-accurate way to conduct the census."

Against that background, the census social scientists will recommend either staying with a less-than-perfect head count or going for a statistically adjusted super-guess.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Bush Administration