With the 2010 census a year away and the Obama administration still taking shape, the survey has emerged as a partisan political football.
Earlier this month, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., withdrew as commerce secretary-designate apparently due in part to disagreements with President Obama over the census and other issues. The flap left many Americans wondering why the technical business of counting the population should be such a heated political issue. But politicians, demographers and other census observers know that this year's dustup over the census is only the latest chapter in a long history.
"It has been a political process since the first decision on how to count slaves. It goes back to 1790," said Roberto Suro, a University of Southern California communications professor and long-time census watcher. The nation's first census, he noted, considered a slave as just three-fifths of a person for the decennial head count.
The primary purpose of the census is to count every person living in the United States in order to draw the boundaries of congressional districts and ensure an approximately equal population in each. States and localities also use the data to determine political districts. And the federal government allocates funds for highways, schools, police and other purposes based on the population count.
"What's not political about the census? It's the basis of the two most important things in politics: money and representation," said Harvard professor of government D. Sunshine Hillygus. "Mayors and governors are keenly aware of this. They know that getting an accurate count of their cities is going to directly translate into dollars.
"They also know that whether they get an additional congressman or one less congressman will depend on getting an accurate count."
Gregg's nomination sparked protest from African American and Latino leaders concerned that their communities have been perennially undercounted and afraid that Gregg, a Republican with a track record of opposing extra census funding, would sell them short.
To reassure these groups, President Obama indicated that the White House would exercise strong oversight of the census. But that only inflamed Republican leaders, who accused him of a Democratic "power grab." Obama clarified that he didn't intend to remove the operation from the Commerce Department, but Gregg bowed out of consideration.
The back story to this D.C. drama is the long-standing problem that poor people, immigrants and young people are harder to count because they move more often and are less likely to respond to census enumerators. In 1990, the Census Bureau missed an estimated 8 million people, while double-counting another 4 million mostly white, older, and wealthier Americans.
The fact that the folks who get missed, generally urban minorities, are more likely to be Democratic constituents, is where the partisanship kicks in. Democrats are more eager to see them counted, while the undercount tends to benefit Republicans.
The Clinton Census Bureau suggested before the 2000 census that statistical sampling could yield a more accurate tally than trying to count every individual. But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the plan in 1999, noting that the Constitution calls for "actual enumeration" of the population every 10 years.
Some demographers have also suggested making adjustments after the count is taken, but others question the accuracy of such a system, and so far it hasn't been officially implemented.
"Everything rides on statistical models," said University of California Berkeley statistics professor Philip Stark. "The census isn't perfect, but the question is whether this strategy for adjusting will make the accuracy better or not. All evidence I've seen says it will make it worse."
Considering its challenge, the Census Bureau does a phenomenal job approaching accuracy, added Stark: "It's the largest mobilization in peacetime of people and materials, a huge logistical undertaking."
What has most helped the Census Bureau approach a complete count is outreach. In 2000 the agency launched a massive social marketing campaign to encourage people to complete and mail the census form that arrived in the mail.
That effort -- which involved the participation of numerous ethnic community organizations and assurances that the information collected would be kept confidential -- paid off. The error rate in 2000 improved: The census missed an estimated 4 million people and double-counted about 1 million others.
"The decisions made about how much money to devote to taking the census and doing outreach for the census can make a big difference in the quality of the census," said Hans Johnson, associate director of the Public Policy Institute of California.
That's where the politics comes in again. How much money will the government spend on gasoline and staff time to send enumerators door to door or looking for homeless people under bridges?
"If you accept the premise that some populations are harder to reach than others and counting them requires expending funds, (then) if the decision is made not to spend the money, you're not going to get to those people," said Suro. "So, simply, the fiscal attitude toward the census budget has political consequences."
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks(at)sfchronicle.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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