U.S. Census

Just received the Census 2000 form and waded through the 14 1/2 pages I am expected to fill out for my wife and myself, happy that my two children are not still at home--another 11 pages if they were. Fortunately, I am an accountant, so I can figure out how to allocate joint interest income between person No. 1 and person No. 2 and how to break out the joint city utility bill we pay into its components so I can answer the detailed question on utility costs.

I am intellectually confused by questions 5 (your Hispanic connections) and 6 (your race), which imply that different nations in the Far East and different islands in the Pacific are peopled by separate races and that people from Spain are grouped with “Hispanic/Latino” while those from Portugal or France/Italy are, apparently, “white.” In view of question 10, which asks you to state your ancestry or ethnic origin, why are questions 5 and 6 even needed?

Will anyone be surprised if many of these forms will be incomplete or wind up in the circular file of each house, apartment or mobile home to which they were sent?

MEL WOLF

Burbank

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At my household I received two census forms to fill out. How can the Census Bureau have an accurate count if a household fills out and remits more than one form? Does the Census Bureau have a way of knowing if a household sends in more than one form and to delete one of the forms from the database? I wonder how much of the taxpayers’ money they wasted by sending out more than one form to a household?

MARY L. HERRMANN

Los Angeles

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Does it bother anyone else that the only purpose of the census appears to be to label each person by race and to know where they live? Wasn’t this the process Germany used to prepare the yellow star mailing list?

STU O’GUINN

Huntington Beach

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What if they gave a census and nobody said they were Caucasian?

JEFF MARDER

Los Angeles

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Some years ago, I saw a form for a space in the L.A. schools’ magnet program. The machine reading the form had rejected it. Although it had a variety of boxes to check, the instructions were to check only one. The rejected form was submitted by a student who wrote “child of God” instead.

Maybe we only need one box on the next census.

JOAN MARTIN

Woodland Hills