The bureau operates servers at two sites in the Washington area for redundancy, Polzer said. Down for the count Once the counts are in from both the main census and the verification effort, bureau statisticians will mathematically analyze the data sets to arrive at a corrected estimate of the U.S. population as of April 1. The corrected count can be used for all purposes except apportioning congressional seats. In January of last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the bureau's statistical sampling could not be used for that purpose. The bureau has interpreted the ruling to mean that the corrected count is usable for all other purposes, Singh said.
Users can decide which set they want.
To keep the verification independent, Singh said, the main census and recount efforts have separate staffs and offices. The Census 2000 temporary workers can be hired for the verification effort, but they cannot go back to working on the main census and will not be assigned to the area they canvassed before. Some of the clerical staff members at the bureau's National Processing Center in Jeffersonville, Ind., will be involved in the verification, but not those at the three other regional Census 2000 data capture centers. Census has adopted CAPIs for some of its other surveys to speed up processing because keying or scanning of data is eliminated, Polzer said. Computer-toting Census enumerators will not appear on every street in America, however.