The United States census did not become controversial just recently; it started out that way.
When Thomas Jefferson passed along the first census results to George Washington in 1790, he included the actual count in black lettering and his estimate of the real population in red lettering.
More than 200 years later, politicians are still arguing how to conduct the tally of the nation’s population, which the Constitution requires every 10 years.
That’s why President Clinton flew to Houston Tuesday to endorse a method for counting that he says is guaranteed not only to be the most accurate in history, but the cheapest available.
Republicans say Clinton’s method is guaranteed to produce something else: numbers that will primarily benefit Democrats.
“This is not a political issue, this is an American issue. . . . To me, having an accurate census is a big part of having a strategy for racial reconciliation in America and building one American community that works,” Clinton said.
Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), a member of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which oversees the census, saw it a little differently last year when he called the Clinton census plan a “risky scheme of dubious constitutionality.”
The stakes are huge because the census directly determines two things that are dear to the hearts of politicians: power and money.
The census count not only determines how many congressional districts each state will be allotted, but how billions of dollars in federal and state programs will be distributed.
In addition, private business depends on the census to determine where to locate offices and factories as well as where to sell products and services.
Chicago, for example, lost an estimated $327 million in state and federal funding from 1991 through 1997, officials say, because the city was undercounted by about 250,000 people in the 1990 census.
The problem is as old as the republic. In 1790, the population of America was largely rural, and Jefferson, as secretary of state, sent U.S. marshals on horseback to do an actual headcount.
But Jefferson found what future census takers would discover: Not everybody was home. Not everybody cooperated if they were. And, therefore, not everybody could be easily counted.
By 1970, the government abandoned the practice of sending a census taker to each household and started asking people to mail back a questionnaire, sending census takers only to those households that did not do so.
Nobody ever pretended the results were exact. When draft notices went out in 1940, 13 percent more black men reported for duty than census numbers indicated existed.
But in a nation where progress is viewed as inevitable, it came as a shock in 1990 when for the first time the census was less accurate than the preceding one.
“We now know that the census missed 8 million Americans living in inner cities and in remote rural areas,” Clinton said at a roundtable discussion in inner-city Houston. “We know, too, interestingly enough, that it double-counted 4 million Americans, many of whom had the good fortune to own two homes.”
In the view of critics, the outcome was even worse: Americans were not being miscounted equally.
Compared to the undercount rate for whites, the undercount rate was six times larger for African-Americans and seven times larger for Hispanics. Twelve percent of all American Indians living on reservations were not counted, according to census estimates. What’s more, 52 percent of the undercounted population were children.
The 1990 census was the most expensive in history, costing more than $2 billion and employing half a million people. When it was over, a statistical analysis determined that the undercount rate was 50 percent greater than the rate had been 10 years before.
Census officials say that if the same methods are used in 2000, the error rate will be even greater.
Enter the Clinton solution and a Republican swearword: sampling.
The Census Bureau comes under the authority of Commerce Secretary William Daley of Chicago, who plans to be deeply involved in this highly political fight. Daley thinks that by using mailed questionnaires, follow-up visits, and new software that will prevent double-counting, the Census Bureau can count about 90 percent of the population accurately.
The remaining 10 percent, the Commerce Department says, should be estimated scientifically by a “sampling” method endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences. It is expected that this 10 percent will contain traditionally undercounted groups including minorities, which tend to be Democratic, and the homeless, who tend congregate in America’s cities, which are mostly under Democratic control.
Democrats contend this is one reason the Republicans are so opposed to sampling. The Republicans in Congress are suing in federal court on the grounds that the Constitution calls for an “actual enumeration,” which they say means an actual head count, not a “guess,” no matter how scientific.
The Census Bureau says an actual head count, aside from adding $675 million to $800 million in costs to what already is estimated to be a $4.2 billion project, would turn out to be less accurate than sampling.
In Houston, Clinton came up against the real problem of endorsing sampling, when he asked his roundtable of community leaders and scientists what he could say “to the skeptics who say no statistician with a computer can compete with people going around door-to-door and counting heads.”
Clinton asked the question twice and never got a good answer so he provided one of his own. He said sampling was like political polling.
“I mean, most people understand that a poll taken before an election is a statistical sample,” Clinton said. “And sometimes it’s wrong, but more often than not it’s right. And there you may only sample a thousand people out of millions of voters.”
Clinton added that because people often are not home, it is hard to count them and followed up by saying: “The only place I know that probably got a good head count recently. . . . is Iraq, where they shut the whole country down for a day.”
“Nobody moves, everybody stays home, kids have to play in front of their house, just stay there, ” Clinton said. “That doesn’t seem to me to be a practical alternative for us.”
