Foolishly, the Census Bureau is planning to go ahead with two types of counts for the 2000 Census.
Despite the fact the Supreme Court has rejected the Clinton administration's effort to employ statistical sampling to determine the number of congressional representatives from each state, the Census Bureau is going to use that method anyway.While Census Director Kenneth Prewitt announced the traditional head count method (the one mandated by the Constitution) will be used to determine House apportionment, the sampling method will also be used separately. He justifies this by saying the sampling method will be used for purposes other than House apportionment -- which may include drawing the boundaries for congressional and legislative districts in each state.
But all this end run by the Census Bureau does is add confusion, not clarification, to the census procedure. It also will add considerable cost to the $4 billion already budgeted for the traditional census.
Under normal conditions, statistical sampling is highly reliable. Done correctly, its accuracy can be measured to within a range of a few percentage points. But when politics enters the picture, the conditions are hardly normal.
The president and most Democrat lawmakers say the head count method isn't fair to those minorities and inner-city Americans who are difficult to reach. By some estimates, the 1990 Census left out 6 million of these people. They thus become pawns in a partisan political battle.
Clearly, an accurate count is important, but more important is following the law to obtain that count. The two are hardly mutally exclusive.
What the administration and Congress should be doing is utilizing their resources to improve the authorized head count procedure. Rep. Dan Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House census subcomittee, has introduced an $800 million package of measures designed to increase the accuracy of the traditional method.
How will the Census Bureau's awkward plan affect Miller's proposal? Miller believes the two-headed approach will be a disaster and that there is a possibility both censuses will be seriously flawed.
He may or may not be right. Unfortunately, the Census Bureau has put the census procedure at risk with its unwise decision.