Economic Bad Times Could Affect Accuracy Of 2010 Census

Federal head-counters hope that streamlined questionnaires mean more people than ever will mail back completed forms when the constitutionally mandated, once-a-decade census begins in earnest a year from Wednesday.
 

That could save big money, because sending enumerators out to knock on doors costs hundreds of millions of dollars. And it could help ensure greater accuracy for a decennial count that is believed to miss millions of people, mostly ethnic and racial minorities.
 

But there is nothing simple about trying to count every single one of the 306 million or so people residing in the United States, especially in the case of ''hard to count'' populations -- immigrants, Hispanics, and blacks, among others.
 

The unwinding economic crisis threatens to make a difficult job even harder. Millions of people -- foreclosed on, out of work -- are expected to be displaced from homes and communities, on the move and hard to pin down when census time comes, federal officials and advocates say.
 

''That is a huge challenge for what is a household-based operation,'' said Terri Ann Lowenthal, an analyst who works with The Census Project, an organization that promotes policies to ensure an accurate count. ``I'm worried that in hard-hit communities, where people are losing jobs and neighborhoods are being abandoned, people may not have the ties, the interest or the time to participate.''

This week, the Census Bureau undertook two major efforts designed to pave the way for next year's count. About 140,000 canvassers armed with handheld devices fanned out to verify millions of addresses.
 

And the bureau launched Census Partnership, a $600 million multilingual outreach and publicity campaign that will use thousands of organizations, news outlets, schoolchildren and recognized minority leaders to spread the word about the census and why it's good to be counted, using traditional media as well as social networking sites. The count is the basis for apportioning seats in Congress and dividing up $300 billion in federal funds for states, counties and municipalities.
 

In Florida, Census liaison Juanita Mainster said, ``We just have everything, all the different challenges -- from language isolation to immigrants, migrant farmworkers and Native Americans -- and we need to reach out to every spectrum.
 

``We are at the stage right now where we are reaching out to identify and hire people from these particular communities, so that people can relate to our staff because they come from those communities.''
 

National Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo also has jumped in. Its executives promise an unusually broad range of census-themed ads and programming -- from census public-service spots by soccer sportscasters to writing census-themed story lines into popular telenovelas.
 

Voto Latino, a national group that has waged successful voter registration drives, will turn its attention to the census, said Maria Teresa Petersen, its executive director. In some cases the group will reach out to teenagers who are often the translators for their parents. She said the group also will enlist the help of Hispanic DJs and rappers.
 

Karen Love, first vice chairwoman of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents about 200 black newspapers, said many blacks are leery of someone knocking on their door.
 

''We need to create the buzz in the barbershops, in the beauty parlors . . . get the ministers speaking from the pulpit,'' she said.

The hump that Census Bureau officials must overcome is substantial. Studies show that 18 percent to 20 percent of the population is ''cynical that this is a good thing to do,'' said Arnold Jackson, the bureau's associate director for the census, at Monday's partnership launch in Washington, D.C.
 

''These are the people who don't want to participate and we will only reach with your assistance,'' he told dozens of volunteers in attendance.
 

Minorities are especially hard hit by the economic crisis, making them potentially harder than ever to count, advocates say. That chore is further complicated by the presence in the country of record numbers of immigrants, legal and illegal, speaking many languages other than English, and with little knowledge of the census.
 

Mistrust spawned by immigration roundups and other enforcement actions means many immigrants are leery of contact with the government, no matter how benign, advocates and officials say -- even though census responses are strictly confidential and can't be shared with anyone in government, ''even the president,'' said Census Bureau spokesman Raul Cisneros.
 

The Government Accountability Office has been voicing concerns for months about the Census Bureau's readiness, especially after technical problems forced abandonment of a plan to send out census counters with handheld computers for the first time, and cut short a critical 2008 run-through.
 

The technical glitch led to the resignation of the bureau's director -- a permanent replacement has yet to be named -- and the census counters will be armed with only paper next year. But Census Bureau officials insist they will be ready, thanks in part to an additional $1 billion from President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package.
 

They're counting on the elimination of the long form to boost mail-return rates. The detailed questionnaire, which previously was mailed to some households, was made moot by the American Community Survey, a continuing series of surveys that now provides a regular diet of population, household and economic statistics.
 

About a quarter of the stimulus billion will go toward expanding the Census Partnership program, which Census Bureau officials and advocates consider an important factor in the relative success of the 2000 count, considered the most accurate to date.
 

''A year from now, the populace will have seen and heard more ads in national and local media than in any prior census,'' the Census Bureau's acting director, Thomas L. Mesenbourg, told a House subcommittee last week.