Census 2010

Census 2010 will be overseen by the Obama Administration. This may be unconstitutional, because Actual Enumeration is found in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, implying that the census is the responsibility of the Legislative branch.

President Obama has chosen Robert M. Groves as the census director. Groves is a professor at the University of Michigan, and is known to favor sampling over the Actual Enumeration required by the Constitution.

Design Changes New to This Census

"The 2010 census has an innovative design, resulting in a census that will differ from its predecessor to a very substantial degree." So many changes could easily open a new loophole for manipulation, and it's important that we analyze these changes carefully. There are four major design differences between the 2000 and 2010 censuses.

First, the 2010 census will be a "Short-Form Only Census". "For the first time since 1930, there will be no "long form." The lengthier survey previously has gone to one in every six households and asked about everything from property taxes and indoor plumbing to education, ancestry and commuting patterns." "Every household in 2010 will get a shorter Census form, as required by the Constitution. This "short form" asks all members of every household their gender, age, race, ethnicity, relationship to the head of household and whether the home is owned or rented."

Second, the 2010 system will use an updated version of the MAF/TIGER system. As described by the Census Bureau, "The MAF, or Master Address File, is designed to be a complete and current list of all addresses and locations where people live or work, covering an estimated 115 million residences, as well as 60 million businesses and other structures in the U.S. The TIGER® portion of the project is a digital database that identifies the type, location and name of streets, rivers, railroads and other geographic features, and geospatially defines their relationships to each other, to the MAF addresses, and to numerous other entities." The improvements to the databases will include:

"(1) the realignment of every street and boundary in the TIGER database;
(2) development of a new MAF/TIGER processing environment and the integration of the two previously separate resources into a common technical platform;
(3) collection of global positioning system coordinates for structures on MAF;
(4) expansion of geographic partnership programs with state, local, and tribal governments, other federal agencies, the U.S. Postal Service, and the private sector;
(5) implementation of a program to use ACS enumerators to generate address updates, primarily in rural areas; and
(6) the use of periodic evaluation activities to provide quality metrics to guide corrective actions"

Actual Enumeration

There are several ways in which Obama might circumvent the requirement of Actual Enumeration, in order to gerrymander districts to favor his reelection. The census also affects the electoral college.

In a blog entry, Michael Barone said the following:

“Article I (as Joseph Biden didn't know in debate) is about the legislative, not the executive branch. Hence, it is argued, the president can't substitute a sampling for the enumeration required to be done by the secretary.
“However, it is undoubtedly true that the president can fire the secretary of commerce for any reason, including failure to conduct the Census the way he wants the Census conducted.”

There are no checks and balances to prevent the President from manipulating the Secretary of Commerce.

Sampling and Hot-Deck Imputation

When he served in the census bureaus from 1990 to 1992, Robert M. Groves favored sampling, rather than Actual Enumeration. In 1999, Doc v. United States House of Representatives, 525 U.S. 316 (1999) ruled that sampling cannot be used in redistricting during a census.

This ruling against sampling was a step in the right direction, but other techniques which lend themselves to fraud still exist. Hot-Deck Imputation replaces missing data with data taken from other results of the same set.