Playing political games with the US census
The Bush administration's mismanagement of the Census Bureau is posing a threat to the integrity of the 2010 census. Among other problems, there's this:
Lawmakers must also ensure that the final census funding bill includes a provision from the House version that would require the bureau to spend $8 million to $10 million of its budget on the Census in Schools program. The program, which provides take-home materials to educate families about the census, proved effective in reaching hard-to-count populations during the 2000 census. But the House committee that oversees the bureau learned last spring that the Commerce Department planned to shrink the program.
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The quality of the nation’s democracy depends on the census, because the numbers are used to decide the number of Congressional seats from each state and hence the number of votes each state has in the Electoral College. It’s hard to ignore the impression of partisan motives in policies that hobble the census, because an inaccurate census invariably undercounts out-of-the-mainstream groups not typically aligned with Republicans.
I suppose it's possible that the crippling of a census program which improves the accuracy of counting minorities is just a coincidence. Of course, it's also possible that the Iraq invasion had nothing to do with the fact that Iraq's chief export is petroleum.
Both possibilities seem equally unlikely.