“And the LORD spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls.”
All the b’nai mitzvot with the unique misfortune of being stuck with a Torah portion from the Book of Numbers surely know just how monotonous and uninteresting a census can be. It really is just counting (sample line: “Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe of Reuben, were forty and six thousand and five hundred”) with the exciting interjection of Moses’ sister getting leprosy (Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous).
And while leprosy and divine punishment are hardly everyday occurrences in 2010, censuses still happen, except they’re mandated by the Constitution, not Yahweh. Every ten years, as I’m sure you know, the federal government — specifically the Census Bureau — sends out forms to every household and asks for basic demographic data so that we can have a better idea of the number and composition of who lives in America. Although this may present bias, it’s probably safe to say that this census is the most well publicized (and contentious) one in memory.
At a time when mistrust of the federal government — especially by conservative tea partiers — is rampant, the census is bound to draw some fire. A particular objection is that the census asks for information beyond just how many people live in a certain household. What draws the most fire are the questions about race.
Before 2000, people were not given the option of checking off multiple races. In the past few weeks, Census Director Robert Groves (whose son attends Northwestern) has been running around apologizing for including “Negro” along with “black” and “Afro-American” in the section of the census where you mark your race. His justification for including the outdated term was that a good number of people — who would surely be considered black — described themselves as Negro in a study conducted by the Census Bureau.
Race does not cause consternation solely among those who are offended by archaic terminology. Some conservatives object to this — or any personal information — being included on the census form at all. For example, Michelle Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican Congresswoman, said that, “I know for my family, the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home. We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that.”
Of course, not filling out the census is illegal. If conservatives are less likely to respond to the census because of fears that the Obama administration, ACORN, and the Trilateral Commission will do something nefarious with it, it will lead to conservative states not getting as many congressional seats as they ought to. Bachmann’s outburst led to Patrick McHenry, a conservative Republican Congressman from North Carolina, to encourage everyone to fill out the entire census. The irony is that if conservatives or people from conservative states have an especially low response rate – and there is some evidence that they might — then they’ll end up losing political power.
And this is why the census matters. Unlike voting, where the chances are frankly miniscule that your vote will end up mattering in the sense that it will actually affect the outcome of the election, every census form sent in really does matter. The federal government apportions all sorts of things besides congressional seats — namely infrastructure spending — based on census results. According to the Census Bureau, some $400 billion dollars is spent in aid and support for states, regions and municipalities by the federal government, and how that money is divided up is intimately tied to the count of the population they have from the census. And your community, in our case, Evanston, Chicago Metro Area etc etc, really does lose out if it doesn’t get its fair share of federal support.
Ultimately, the government is going to spend lots of money and they are going to do it with the information they have, so why not make that information as good and accurate as possible? Every form really does count, even if it’s just the federal government, not God, ordering you to send it in.