The Census Bureau received more than 2.4 million forms during the 2000 Census that, at first blush, appeared to be duplicates, census officials said today. After sifting through them officials allowed more than 2.3 million people listed on the forms to remain in the census count. The officials said that in determining which of the seeming duplicate forms would be deemed valid and which discarded, they tended to err on the side of keeping people in the official count.
Officials acknowledge that by doing that, they have undoubtedly ended up counting people twice.
But we cannot say for certain that there are no people in that 2.3 million who were not double-counted. The duplication was sketched out in a internal Census Bureau memorandum on Nov. 21 and detailed in a briefing on Tuesday to members of Congressional staffs, the Census Monitoring Board an oversight committee and the National Academy of Sciences. The report gives the first glimpse of an overcount issue in the 2000 census, an issue that is often overshadowed by that of an undercount. Census officials say the only way to get a handle on the size of both the undercount and the overcount is to use data from a 314,000-household survey known as ACE, or accuracy and coverage evaluation. Whether to use the survey to adjust the census has been the subject of a fight between Democrats and Republicans for the past several years.