Discover Politics

Was Representative Bachmann right to refuse the census?

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann has made headlines by saying she plans to refuse to answer the 2010 U.S. Census.  News coverage suggests there is some all-around misunderstanding of how the census actually works.

First, the failure to return a census form by mail triggers a visit from a door-to-door census worker known as an “enumerator.”  Consequently, people contemplating such action might actually spur more government intrusion and expense, rather than less.

Moreover, if a resident fails to cooperate with the enumerator or if an enumerator is unable to track down a resident, then the resident doesn’t go uncounted.  The enumerator is authorized—indeed, encouraged—to gather as much information as possible from the resident’s neighbors.

I know from personal experience as an enumerator in 2000 that one’s neighbors are both surprisingly knowledgeable and delightfully cooperative.  Indeed, in the case of the census “short form,” which is distributed to five out of every six homes, neighbors typically know more than is needed, with the possible exception of specific birthdates.

In fact, it could be argued that the decreased accuracy of a count precipitated by noncompliance by some residents could actually lead to an overcount.  This happens when enumerators wind up counting people based on neighbors’ faulty reports that people lived in a household on the official Census Day, April 1, when in fact they didn’t.

For example, in 2000, when I couldn’t catch up with a resident of an apartment near the University of Minnesota, I asked for a neighbor’s help and got the resident’s form completed.  Later I learned that the resident had already been counted elsewhere, because she commuted from her home in rural Minnesota and used the U of M apartment only a few days a week.  Yet it was too late to fix the error—the forms for both residences had already been processed.

A lot of such overcounting takes place in Minnesota.  Our state has some characteristics that make it prone to overcounting—including lots of snowbirds who get counted both in Minnesota and at their Southern residences and lots of students who get counted both at home and at college.  Indeed, the U.S. Census Bureau has estimated that in 2000 Minnesota was overcounted by 1.7 percent (equaling more than 80,000 people), which was the highest overcount in the nation.

There has been discussion of how Minnesota might lose a seat in Congress after the next census because our state is not matching the population growth of other states.  Yet it’s possible that because of the overcount in 2000, we’re currently over-represented.

It’s understandable that people are wary of completing the “long form,” distributed to one of every six households, which asks questions about income, work status, plumbing, heating, health insurance, marital history, and much, much more.  As an advocate of answering the census, even I question the need for such intrusion, and inasmuch as Rep. Bachmann can have influence in scaling back the extent of the Census Bureau’s questionnaires, I think she would find a great deal of support with Minnesotans.

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Kent Kaiser, PhD, is a professor of communication at Northwestern College in Roseville.  He worked part-time as an enumerator during the 2000 U.S. Census in Saint Paul and full-time as the recruiting operations supervisor in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Duluth regional office in 1990.  He also served as the Minnesota Secretary of State’s liaison to the U.S. Census in 2000.