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0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 4, 2001 | by August Gribbin

Statisticians and scholars say the Census Bureau has been compromised and its data `politicized.' Bureau representatives, however, claim their agency is nonpartisan and objective.

The latest census has set off a new round of legal challenges. So far, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Stamford, Conn., and Inglewood, Calif., have filed lawsuits against the federal government. Others are sure to follow. Utah is suing, too, arguing the Census Bureau improperly failed to count 11,176 state residents who were serving overseas as missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Legal disputes following a census hardly are new; in fact, they are expected. Census totals have tremendous significance, dictating fundamental shifts of political power and redirecting staggering sums of federal money. "The census and its function seem too politically potent [for politicians and state officials] to ignore, even though the tradition has been to view the census as sacrosanct and off-limits to political meddling," says economist Peyton Young of the Brookings Institution.

In the last few years, the most prominent census battles have been fought in Congress. There, Republicans fended off Democrats favoring the use of statistically adjusted census totals to compensate for an expected undercount of minorities. Both parties assumed that adding to the head count would swell Democratic ranks and disadvantage the GOP.

Secretary of Commerce Donald L. Evans seemed to settle that issue on March 6, stating that statistically adjusted head-count totals couldn't be used to redraw the nation's voting-district boundaries. But in the weeks that followed mayors, county executives, borough bosses and city councils have taken up the fight, battling Evans' decision in the courts.

According to many historians, the rationale for keeping the census nonpartisan can be traced back to the nation's founders, who ordered that congressional seats be redistributed based on decennial census numbers. The framers foresaw that representatives of the 13 colonies would want to perpetuate their congressional seats and their power, even though new states might join the union and come to have larger populations.

Indeed, Census 2000 results illustrate how populations can grow and change things. The new numbers reveal that the U.S. population has grown more rapidly than anticipated and now numbers 281,421,906. About 211.5 million people describe themselves as white only and 34.7 million as black only. More than 35 million U.S. residents call themselves Hispanic (but who may be of any race), making them the largest minority at 13 percent.

There were about 50 lawsuits following the 1990 census. Most were thrown out, and none succeeded. But in 1920, a stubborn Congress overwhelmingly populated by representatives from rural districts and small towns rejected the census entirely, refusing to accept that the U.S. population had shifted from farms to cities. Consequently, Congress stayed with the 1910 head count rather than reallocating seats in the House.

"By the late 1920s, that had created big problems," says census historian Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "It took 45 years for Congress to resolve the issues resulting from that decision." Few expect a similar congressional revolt again, partially because accurate census data has become the indispensable lifeblood of huge segments of business and industry, as well as academics and federal, state and local government planners.

Nevertheless, officeholders from both parties increasingly accuse bureau officials of manipulating data for the political gain. "You could make the argument that such attacks are a threat to the entire U.S. statistical system," Anderson says. "They damage the assumption of objectivity."

Census Bureau representatives claim scientific objectivity, however, and argue that their agency has been nonpartisan since 1880, when professionals replaced U.S. marshals as census-data gatherers. "Being nonpartisan is part of the Census Bureau culture," says Paula Schneider, one of the bureau's highest-ranking officials until she retired in April after 33 years. "At the risk of seeming fractious, when political appointees come into the bureau, we tell them outright we will not change what we say in reports or alter press releases to benefit any party."

Kenneth Prewitt, director of graduate faculty at New York's New School for Social Research, was the Census Bureau director until January. "No one has ever considered what census employees would have to do to rig the numbers to get a certain result," he says. "It's hard to know how you'd do it. You'd need precise and minute knowledge of redistricting and voter turnout. People in [the bureau's headquarters] know nothing about those processes. Fixing the numbers would present a gigantic problem, involving a large number of people. It could never be kept quiet."

Still, the bureau's supposed link to a given administration can seem suspect because it is a unit of the Commerce Department, and the secretary of commerce is a member of the president's Cabinet. In recent Democratic and Republican administrations, the post has been awarded to the president's political campaign manager.