NewsMax.com
Wednesday, March 7, 2001

The decision is now in: The Census Bureau will count only those Americans its enumerators have actually counted, which is how it has always been done since the Constitution first required an "actual enumeration" every 10 years.

Democrats and activist organizations purporting to represent non-white Americans have endeavored for years to get the bureau to make what amounts to statistical guesses about how many people may have been missed when the door-to-door and direct-mail tabulations are made every decade.

They failed in the past, and they failed again, this time with the bureau under the direction of the new Republican commerce secretary, Don Evans, whose Cabinet department runs the Census Bureau.

When it appeared as though civil-service officials within the bureau might recommend to the secretary that he opt to use "statistical sampling" to arrive at "adjusted" census figures, to add more minorities to the final tally, the Democratic Party insisted their recommendation be followed.

Liberals charged that if the Bush-Cheney administration did not accept the recommendation of the bureau's non-political experts it would be "politicizing" the census results.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson went so far as to charge that President Bush "stole the election" and "now he is trying to steal the census."

To their dismay, the recommendation of the statisticians turned out to be just the opposite from what they had wanted.

It called for using the actual-count figures, which it said has now become the most-accurate way of enumerating the American population.

Evans accepted that recommendation, and the wind – at least temporarily – was let out of the pro-sampling advocates' sails.

Result: The actual-count figures will go out to the states by no later than April 1.

Those are the data that state legislatures use in drawing the new boundary lines for congressional and state legislative districts.

They are also the basis on which the federal government sends back to the states some $185 billion in revenues it has collected from taxpayers nationwide.

Those are the two principal concerns Democrats have had when they pressed for a statistically estimated, rather than actual, count – because they thought that would work to their advantage politically.

They had placed high hopes on a statistically adjusted census giving them a realignment of congressional districts that would enable the Democratic Party to regain control of the narrowly divided House of Representatives in the 2002 election.

The actual count of Americans in the 2000 census is 282,421,906.

As reported by the Associated Press, a bureau survey made after the 2000 tally estimated a net "undercount" of 1.2 percent of Americans, or about 3.3 million persons.

The AP said that was down from the estimate of 1.6 percent made after the 1990 census, or about 4 million persons.

The Bush-Cheney administration has contended that as the Census Bureau's enumeration techniques continue to improve, the actual count is getting increasingly accurate and the argument for a statistical adjustment is growing weaker.

One of the objections to statistical sampling is that in order to make a final count come out the way those designing the sampling think it should, in some instances the numbers of non-minorities actually counted have to be reduced to raise the numbers of minorities being estimated.

Opponents of the actual count indicate Evans' decision will be challenged in court.

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