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Editorial Counterpoint: You needn't stand up to be counted

Here are some realities about the census and about Michele Bachmann's opposition to it that the Star Tribune didn't check.

By KENT KAISER

Last update: June 29, 2009 - 5:13 PM

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A recent editorial about U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann's planned refusal to fully participate in the 2010 census ("After census dither, take a reality check," June 27) suggested misunderstandings of how the census actually works -- more so on the part of the paper than on the part of the congresswoman.

The editorial didn't mention that failing return a census form by mail triggers a visit from a door-to-door census worker known as an "enumerator." Consequently, people contemplating such action might actually spur more government intrusion and expense, rather than less.

Moreover, the editorial seemed not to understand that if a resident fails to cooperate with the enumerator or if an enumerator is unable to track down a resident, the resident doesn't go uncounted. The enumerator is authorized -- indeed, encouraged -- to gather as much information as possible from the resident's neighbors.

I know from my experience as an enumerator in 2000 that neighbors are both surprisingly knowledgeable and delightfully cooperative. Indeed, in the case of the census "short form," which is distributed to five out of every six homes, neighbors typically know more than is needed, with the possible exception of birth dates.

Consequently, I believe the editorial sounded an unjustifiably shrill cry about how a refusal to answer the census could harm our state in terms of ascertaining an accurate count for the purpose of congressional reapportionment -- the constitutionally explicit reason for doing the census.

In fact, it could be argued that noncompliance could actually lead to an overcount. This happens when enumerators wind up counting people based on neighbors' faulty reports that people lived in a household on the official Census Day, April 1, when in fact they didn't.

For example, in 2000, when I couldn't catch up with a resident of an apartment near the University of Minnesota, I asked for a neighbor's help and got the resident's form completed. Later I learned that the resident had already been counted elsewhere because she commuted from rural Minnesota and used the U of M apartment only a few days a week. Yet it was too late to fix the error -- both forms had been processed.

Minnesota has characteristics that make it prone to overcounting. There are snowbirds who get counted both in Minnesota and at their southern residences, students who get counted both at home and at college, and Native Americans who get counted both in the Twin Cities, where they live, and on the reservations where they're enrolled. Indeed, the Census Bureau estimated that in 2000 Minnesota was overcounted by 1.7 percent (more than 8,000 people), the highest overcount in the nation.

Finally, the editorial portrayed Bachmann's protestation of the census' intrusion as being "outside-the-mainstream." Yet, since 1790, when the first U.S. census was taken, many members of Congress have expressed serious concerns over the extent of the information collected by the government. Early on, there were concerns over the "indelicacy" of asking women their ages and about the difficulty for some people to report an occupation when they held different jobs in different seasons of the year.

Today, the "long form," distributed to one in six households, asks questions about income, work status, plumbing, heating, health insurance, marital history and much more. Though I advocate answering the census, even I question the need for such intrusion, and the reality is that most Americans do, too.

Kent Kaiser is a professor of communications at Northwestern College in Roseville. He worked part time as an enumerator during the 2000 census in St. Paul and full time in the Census Bureau's Duluth regional office in 1990. He was also the Minnesota secretary of state's liaison to the census in 2000.

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