Counting Fringes Beginning in March, the Census Bureau will try to count an estimated 270 million people in 118 million households, whether they are citizens by birth or naturalization, or legal or illegal residents. For the reasons listed above, and others, Latinos are among the groups that are the most difficult to count accurately. In 1990, Hispanics were undercounted by 5 percent, or more than one million people. The undercount meant that Hispanics living in states with high numbers of uncounted Hispanics lost out, politically and economically. Because of those dismal results, then-President George Bush asked the Bureau of the Census and the Congress to design a better and less costly plan to count the nation's population.
Every population has people who are missed.
Gingrich thinks that sampling could become a nightmare when used to count large multi-racial neighborhoods. Contending that in such a case the medicine is worse than the ailment, he wonders how such a method could ever accurately identify who is Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, or Jewish. The Republican leadership in Congress and the Southeastern Legal Foundation have fought the Census plan in court. Last year, a lower court ruled in their favor, saying that counting citizens, not sampling them, is required by the Constitution. One of the members of the three-member judicial panel was Federal District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, a Latino recently appointed to the bench by President Clinton.