Word: census
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Ironically enough, Congress' own General Accounting Office uses statistical sampling, and so do several other national agencies. If other agencies see fit to use this device, surely it is accurate enough for the census...
...also seems fairly obvious that, given that the population is growing larger, statistical sampling will have to be adopted sooner or later. Why not now, then, so that we can save those several million dollars and do something more useful? The largest group of lobbyists for the census are business leaders who want to use the census as free market data. Although business interests are fine and good, there are a lot more useful things that could come of several million dollars for the rest of the country, and businesses could conduct their research with their own money...
That does not mean that the census should be eliminated, especially because as things stand now, it can't. The census is a large part of our national history, probably more so than in any nation's history. It was only through the census that the Constitutional Convention gained any ground. The 10-year census was written into law to ensure that the House of Representatives could function. And even then, when the census took 18 months and counted fewer than four million people, it was not accurate. Is it surprising that with a population 60 times that size that...
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who are missed by the census are at the lower income level. For that reason, the Republican party was upset at the idea of statistical sampling. Census takers believed that this new method would compensate for those missed, and since that part of the county tends to be mostly Democratic, the Republican party felt they would lose seats if districts were redrawn. However, also included in the people missed in the Census are the rural poor, who usually tend to vote Republican, and so most people believe that few drastic changes will be necessary...
...surely, if drastic changes are needed to redraw district lines to more accurately reflect the population, they should be made. When historians look back at the census of the millennium, we don't want them to take the political tenor of the country into their consideration of numbers...