Census May Have Missed 10 Million in 1990, Congress Investigators Say

Nearly 10 million people may have been overlooked in the 1990 census, congressional investigators said Thursday.

That is nearly double the Census Bureau estimate, L. Nye Stevens of the General Accounting Office told a House subcommittee.

Census takers made 14 million errors in counting the U.S. population last year, which Stevens said were a combination of people counted more than once and those never counted.

“The 1990 census appears to have had at least 50% more errors than it had in 1980,” Stevens told the House Post Office and Civil Service subcommittee on census and population.

The Census Bureau’s estimate was based on a survey taken shortly after the census. But the estimate does not include other types of errors, such as people placed in the wrong location or infants counted even though they were born after census day.

The Bush Administration must decide by July 15 whether, for the first time in the history of the census, to replace the population count with estimates.

The deadline was set by a federal court in New York hearing a lawsuit filed by states and big cities to force a census correction.

The 1990 census counted 248.7 million people in the United States, but the Census Bureau estimates that number is 5.3 million short of the true population.

Census officials have blamed errors on a number of problems, including the tendency of poor people in big cities not to mail back their forms and difficulty in getting correct address lists in some areas.