Use Two Counts for Census 2000

Re “Judges Rule Against Use of Sampling for Census,” Aug. 25: We need a two-number census 2000 that includes a full-court press for traditional enumeration and then incorporates sampling to correct undercounts. The decennial census cannot be both the constitutionally mandated basis of reapportionment and a data-gathering machine for a wide range of other needs.

How people are counted for reapportionment is a congressional and constitutional affair that has never been fair: Slaves, non-property owners, women and urban populations have all been purposely uncounted or undercounted by Congress. After the 1920 census, Congress did not reapportion itself because the rural interests feared giving over majority rule to urban representatives. Allocating power is a raw political process that should be hammered out in elections and constitutional amendments, not in a census.

The census is information infrastructure too important to play with for political gains. Our information-dependent society needs the best possible data for the next 10 years. Since the Census Bureau must plan for both a sampling and traditional census, let’s have both methods used as appropriate to their respective mandates. A full-effort traditional enumeration yields the best possible count for reapportionment and, after a cut-off date, sampling kicks in to adjust the count for all other purposes. There is time and money to have both methods.

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMSON

American Planning Assn.

Research Fellow on Census 2000

Los Angeles

* Our Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom established a census system that enumerated a slave as three-fifths of a person and a woman not at all. Is this the splendid “tradition of a system of enumeration” from which Newt Gingrich does not want us to deviate?

FRANCES SPIELBERG

Pacific Palisades