Opinion ID: 391912
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Remedy Imposed by the District Court

Text: 19 The parties appear to agree that neither the Census Bureau nor any other institution certainly not the federal courts independently have the resources or expertise to develop a statistical and analytical methodology which will permit adjustment of (the census for) critical variables (i. e., selected subnational geographical units and selected characteristics) in a timely fashion. 45 Fed.Reg. 82877 (1980). The undercount cannot be accurately distributed to subnational geographic units because we do not know in which communities the uncounted live. That leaves the remedy adopted by the District Court as the only possible remedy for correcting an undercount, the only remedy that anyone has seriously proposed. This remedy is a so-called synthetic method of adjustment. This method, simply stated, distributes an undercount, based on race, age, sex or other characteristics, to counties, cities, states or regions in accordance with the actual local head count already obtained by the census for that particular group. It requires a pro rata distribution of the undercounted elements of the population. 20 The Census Bureau points out that past samples and studies show that there are substantial geographical variations in any undercount and that synthetic distributions introduce serious distortions not present in the unadjusted data Id. If it should be the case that all or parts of Minneapolis, Dallas, Pasadena and Pittsburgh are relatively affluent and easy to count, it introduces serious distortions in the census, and in any legislative apportionment based on the census, when we increase their voting strength by adding people who are not there. To give another example of the distortions inherent in the synthetic method, one city whose hispanic population may not be undercounted at all Coral Gables, Florida would receive a population increase, and hence more legislative representation, than a rural county in North Florida whose disadvantaged black and white populations were undercounted at a much higher rate than the national average. 21 The proposed remedy may not redress, but rather may exacerbate the condition to be corrected for another reason as well. If the undercount of whites is on the order of 3 million people (approximately 1.5%) and most of this undercount comes from the approximately 15% of the white population that is hard to count because disadvantaged, as appears to be the case, the synthetic method, employed consistently, would distribute 85% of the white undercount, or 2.5 million people, to the 85% of the white population who are, relatively speaking, better off. Such a distribution would simply have the effect of adding to the voting strength of that segment of the white population which is least undercounted. Since there would appear to be little or no undercounting of the top 25% of the white population, such a distribution has a practical effect of taking voting strength from disadvantaged whites and giving it to advantaged whites. 22 The same result occurs when we distribute the black undercount. The major portion of an estimated 1 million black undercount (approximately 4%) apparently comes from the approximately 30% of the black population at or below the poverty line because they are hard to count. Yet the synthetic method would add 70% of the black undercount to the voting strength of the more advantaged group, the black middle class. As in the case of whites, distribution of the black undercount according to the synthetic method has the effect of taking voting strength from the disadvantaged black population and giving it disproportionately to the more advantaged members of the same class.