Constitution Says Do It By The Numbers

As elections demonstrate, a poll is an educated guess and not a hard count. A sampling is not an enumeration. Often, pollsters are mistaken.

Here’s how polling warps politics. In the 1996 presidential campaign, most major polls showed Bob Dole trailing throughout by a whopping 12 to 20 percentage points, throwing the GOP into despair. Even right-wing publications hooted at their “sure loser”; dispirited Republicans stayed home in droves.

Toward campaign’s end, the New York Times-CBS poll - run by the most respected statistical geniuses and random samplers alive - showed Bill Clinton ahead by a likely landslide of 18 points. ABC and NBC-Wall Street Journal said 12. But one poll - the Zogby poll for Reuters - was out of step. It showed only a seven-point gap.

On Election Day, the actual enumeration showed Zogby alone to be within one point of accuracy. The other polls that made the Dole campaign a laughingstock in the media - and helped confer a false inevitability to Clinton’s re-election from the start - had been grievously misleading. (In the Times-CBS case, fully 10 points off.)

Thus can reliance on samples distort our politics. Sampling is no science; ask President Thomas E. Dewey and Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Democrats want to gain a political edge in 2000 by changing our method of counting American noses.

This flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution, which in Article I calls for an “actual Enumeration,” with a capital “E” - which means “counting one by one.”

Democrats led by President Clinton say the founding fogies did not have available the blessings of modern sampling and their stricture about counting everybody can be ignored. Liberals want to replace, or “augment,” laborious counting with the educated guesswork of sampling.

Reason: Census takers don’t like to climb five stories in crummy neighborhoods, where residents are more likely to vote Democratic. This assumes most of the people who hide from government bell-ringers or don’t have phones, or can’t read their mail, or are recent immigrants, are likely to be Democrats.

That stereotype strikes me as insulting. But the Democratic minority in Congress, backed up by the White House, insists Democrats have been getting a “short count” by letting the Census Bureau do it the constitutional way. By having a statistician put a thumb on the scale, liberals figure they can pick up a dozen House seats and increase spending on the poor.

Was the 1990 census accurate? Probably not; sloppiness in planning, fearfulness about interviewing and poor mail service failed to count millions - including libertarian moonshiners in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Republicans in Beverly Hills mansions, all threatening armed response.

To do better next time, Democrats want to (1) do another slapdash nose count; (2) redo selected slums with a vengeance, and (3) extrapolate those redone samples to skew - or “weight” - the earlier count. An oversight committee (Charlie Trie, chairman?) would watch out for political manipulation. This is supposed to increase people’s trust in government.

The right answer is to improve enumeration before 2000. To do that: (1) advertise to reassure the reluctant and gain their cooperation; (2) improve mailing lists to reach everyone with an address, and (3) train census foot soldiers to make them more effective in finding the homeless.

The wrong answer is the cockamamie compromise that Clinton and Republican leaders have just perpetrated: a bill passed with a straight face by the Congress, solemnly signed by the president, requiring the Supreme Court to rule in advance on the constitutionality of sampling.

Here’s what will happen. The justices will respond unanimously to the legislative and executive branches: “Whaddaya, out of your minds? Didn’t we just teach you on the legislative veto that we’re not in the business of giving advisory opinions? We will decide when an issue is ripe for our decision and decide who has standing, so take your silly bill and gedoudahere.” (Jurists call this “denying cert.”)

Justice Hugo Black read the line in the Constitution that begins “Congress shall make no law” and opined, “No law means no law.” In the same way, “actual Enumeration” means what it says. Start counting. This sample is not for sale.

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