O.C. Among 15 Sites Urged for Census Review

Rep. Dan Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of a House subcommittee on the census, called Tuesday for a review and possibly a recount in 15 local offices--including East Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Commerce--where he said he suspects possible fraud.

A computer-generated study by the Census Bureau showed unusually rapid completion of the count in the California offices. Miller argued that, because these are traditionally hard-to-count areas with large numbers of minorities and immigrants, the speed is unusual--and should be investigated.

But Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt strongly defended the quality of the count, denied that there is any indication of fraud and said that Miller and his staff do not understand the numbers.

“I urged them to talk to us before going public so they don’t embarrass themselves,” Prewitt said in a telephone call with reporters. “There is no systematic evidence that quality was compromised. We are very pleased with the quality of the census.”

Community leaders said that the speed was attributable to a successful publicity effort to encourage the public to return census forms so minorities would not be undercounted.

“We were visible just about everywhere,” said Carlos Olivas, head of the Santa Ana census office.

Local officials also made the decision to flood the streets with temporary workers, called enumerators, at the start of the final count, according to Prewitt. Santa Ana expected to use 273 enumerators during the first week but instead sent out 859. This enabled the office to finish the job much more rapidly.

East Los Angeles, originally planning to send out a staff of 222, instead dispatched more than 700 workers in the first week.

Beatriz Lopez-Flores, a vice president at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said her organization, local community groups, churches and elected officials worked very hard to get the high rate of response in the three communities.

“If this questioning is because it’s a minority area, then they should go and see “Stand and Deliver,” she said, referring to the movie about minority children at Garfield Elementary School whose test scores were questioned because they were so high. “If they’re politicizing the census, that’s a sad statement.”

Manuel Gomez, who coordinated census efforts for the city of Santa Ana, said the local office and its workers were “very professional and very well organized.”

“I would be very surprised if, after [Congressional] review, they found the kind of discrepancies alleged here,” said Gomez, assistant to the city manager.

Miller and Prewitt, both using the same census data, are arguing about the quality of the work in the follow-up portion of the census, when enumerators knock on doors to get answers from people who did not mail in questionnaires.

Enumerators are supposed to make six attempts to contact residents of a household. Miller contended that the local census managers were pressured to complete the count ahead of schedule, and that could have led to errors or falsification and fraud.

“The American people have invested too much in this census to have it rushed at the expense of quality,” Miller told a news conference, announcing that he has asked for an inquiry by the Census Bureau’s inspector general.

In addition to the three California offices, Miller wants an investigation of two offices in Chicago and operations in parts of Atlanta; Marion County, Ind.; Las Vegas; Newark, N.J.; New Castle, Del.; Rapid City, S.D.; Philadelphia; Florence, Ala.; and the Queens and Manhattan boroughs of New York City.

The three offices in the Los Angeles region are in diverse neighborhoods that contain a mix of Latino, black and Asian residents.

The local offices in question had “red flags,” according to Miller. Compared with the overall numbers from their regions, these offices had unusually rapid performances: They finished far ahead of schedule or showed a sudden surge of activity in a single week.

“These are the hardest-to-count areas,” and it is highly unusual for them to have performance figures that vary greatly from the region, said Miller.

But John Reeder, the regional census director for Los Angeles, said that there is no indication of problems at the three offices. “What they did is their job.”

One reason they were faster is that they had a smaller workload for personal visits because more people than expected returned census forms by mail, according to census officials. Local politicians and community groups were active in encouraging minorities to send in their forms.

Prewitt said that any errors were incidental and were caught by his agency’s own system of safeguards. However, he acknowledged that the census has discarded the questionnaires collected from 150,000 households around the country and is doing a new count because of errors by enumerators or local managers. There were 42 million households visited by enumerators.

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Rosenblatt reported from Washington and Nelson from Los Angeles. Staff writer Peter M. Warren in Orange County also contributed to this report.