WASHINGTON -- It's Census Day 2000 Saturday, but that's only the start of the effort to put a number to every man, woman and child in the United States. How will the Census Bureau do it? Let us count the ways.
The bureau will send out legions of enumerators later this month to find the uncounted from remote Rocky Mountain retreats inhabited by anti-government militias to the onion fields of Oregon worked by migrant workers to the soup kitchens of Los Angeles."We're trying find alternative ways of finding people," said Anjeli Olgeirson of the Census Bureau's Denver regional office.
The bureau has already established "partnership" programs with the 92 Native American tribes in Denver's 10-state region and has contacted community groups to help count everyone, from mountain-man loners to immigrants inhabiting New Mexico's border "colonias."
"We've got a lot of pockets of people who are anti-government, and that's a hard one to deal with," Olgeirson said.
Anti-Washington or not, Census Bureau officials have gone on talk shows to say the census is the way to change government because the census is the way the Constitution set to apportion their representatives.
Taxpayers will pay for the low number of returns: Every 1 percent of the population that must be counted in person adds $25 million to the 2000 census budget on which taxpayers already are spending $6.8 billion -- almost triple the 1990 total.
Census bureau policy is to give non-responders six tries-- three by personal visits by enumerators and three attempts by phone.
But if people are dead set against being counted, bureau officials say there's little they can do: There's a $100 fine, but it hasn't been imposed since the 1970s.
The last case to cause a ruckus was in 1960, when National Review writer William F. Rickenbacker wrote a scathing essay protesting "this snooping questionnaire" and wouldn't respond. The Supreme Court let his conviction stand in 1963.
The number of census forms sent back has fallen from 78 percent in 1970 to 65 percent in 1990. The bureau expects only 61 percent of the 2000 census forms to be mailed back, and as of Friday, 49 percent were returned.
The bureau is waiting until April 11 before trying to locate people who didn't respond. From April 27 until the end of the year, enumerators will comb the country to find the missing.
Some areas get special attention:.
-- In rural Vermont, the census is taken in person in large 1-by-2-foot census binders as it has been taken since 1790. Only Vermont cities get forms in the mail.
-- Counters work with the U.S. Maritime Administration to track crews on tuna boats, research ships and oil rigs.
-- Some 226 remote Alaska villages got counted in January, when fishermen were home for the winter and it was easier to travel on frozen ground.
"We had a wonderful success with Alaska natives," said Jacquelyn Flaherty of the bureau's Seattle office.
Her office also launched new educational programs at ethnic fairs and worked through liaisons to count neo-Nazi groups in Idaho. The Census Bureau circulated posters proclaiming "NO INS, NO FBI, NO CIA, NO IRS."
"There will be a segment of the population that there's nothing anyone can do with," she said. "But I'm very optimistic about the efforts made by our folks."
The count ends Dec. 31, when the Census Bureau sends its report to President Clinton, results are posted on the Internet, and members of Congress start fighting about the accuracy of a count that could reapportion some of out of House seats.
The results of the first census were posted publicly in 1791, but since 1954, Congress has made census forms secret for a period of 72 years.
On the Web, the Census Bureau's address is www.census.gov.