The 2010 Census count shows how the U.S. population has grown and shifted over the last decade.
New York City challenged the official 2010 census count of its population at less than 8.2 million, saying it was too low.
But attributing unwarranted accuracy to a census that claims to count everyone is no less manipulative.
Ironically, in light of its troubles with the law, Acorn was selected in March to assist the U.S. Census in reaching out to minority communities and recruiting census enumerators for the count next year.
Door-stepping is dangerous too. 15 census officials were killed during South Africa's count in 2001.
Its goal, strange as it sounds, is to count only 90% of the households in each census tract (which contains roughly 4, 000 people).
But the Internet may not help count people who do not traditionally respond to the census, said Stephen Dienstfrey, past president of the Association of Public Data Users and co-chairman of the APDU's policy committee.
The U.S. Census Monitoring Board estimates that 529, 782 people were missed in the California count, many of them probably members of a minority, as was typically the case in 1990.
Shlomo Angel, an urban planning expert at New York University, gathered historical and census data from hundreds of cities, digitised thousands of maps and had computers count millions of pixels on satellite pictures.
Republicans spent much of the 1997 appropriations season battling the administration over its plan to use statistical sampling, a technique that uses data from the traditional head count to estimate the number of those who did not respond to census takers.
Drawing attention to the census is especially important in cities and counties with lots of people who are hard to count.
ECONOMIST: The decennial census: The knock on the door | The
The Census was able to reverse a decades-long decline in survey response rates with its 2010 count.
The surprise departure of the head of the Census Bureau further complicates the 2000 census, which is already clouded by partisan controversy in Congress over how to get the most accurate population count.
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