The new administration recently appointed a statistical sampling expert to be the next census director.

CNN: Commentary: GOP wants a census we can count on

In the 1980s Mr Groves supported the use of statistical sampling to estimate how many people the census misses.

ECONOMIST: The decennial census: The knock on the door | The

The Census Bureau thinks the only way to improve the numbers is to make more use of statistical sampling methods.

ECONOMIST: Statistics

Some want to see statistical sampling used to adjust the count.

ECONOMIST: The politics of the census

The judicial panel had to wade through the tortured prose of the 1957 Census Act, which, according to the court, prohibits the use of statistical sampling for congressional reapportionment.

ECONOMIST: Sampling is wrong: official

However, what is less debatable is the need for transparency related to statistical sampling protocols so both parties understand what it is they are producing and receiving with a reasonable degree of confidence.

FORBES: Guest Post by Matthew Nelson

Many Democrats prefer to move toward statistical sampling.

CNN: Commentary: GOP wants a census we can count on

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.

CNN: By Juliana Gruenwald, CQ Staff Writer

John developed our statistical package, our sampling methodology, built our call center, oversaw our network, and pioneered in developing our online polling.

FORBES: John Bruce was a polling genius -- and a pioneer

But Scott Zeger, the head of the department of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins, who performed the statistical analysis in the study, points out that clustered sampling is the rule rather than the exception in public-health studies, and that the patterns of deaths caused by epidemics are also very variable by location.

ECONOMIST: The Iraqi war