Census Chief Defends Use Of Sampling Gop, Which Fears Loss Of Seats, Pushes Costly, Inaccurate Plan, She Says

Congress’ effort to ban sampling in the 2000 census would result in a more costly, less accurate count, Census Director Martha Farnsworth Riche said Friday.

Forcing Census workers to return again and again to try to count every American would add $700 million to $800 million to the effort, already expected to cost $4 billion, she said.

And Riche estimated that the result would miss as many as the 1.9 percent of people overlooked in 1990 - a result that prompted severe criticism at the time.

“I don’t like to ask the taxpayer to pay more money for a worse job, but Congress will make the final decision.” A provision banning use of statistical techniques to adjust the census is included in the disaster-relief bill passed by Congress on Thursday. President Clinton has promised to veto the measure over that and a section preventing government shutdowns in the event of a budget impasse.

After the marred 1990 result, the then-Democratically dominated Congress ordered the Census Bureau to find a way to improve accuracy at a lower cost. The plan in the works for 2000 was developed by the National Academy of Sciences and would use a large sample of the population to estimate the number missed in the count.

But Republicans, who now control Congress, fear adjustment would result in more people being counted in inner-city areas and other Democratic strongholds, possibly leading to a loss of GOP-held seats.

The census figures are used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives among states and to draw district boundaries.

Jim Nicholson, chairman of the Republican National Committee, says “24 to 26 House seats could be affected” by the outcome when census data are used to redraw congressional district lines within individual states. That’s more than double the current GOP majority of 11 seats.