

"What we have to do," Groves added, "is to acknowledge that the product of what we do has political uses but the process can never be politicized."Ĭoncerns voiced mostly by conservatives and congressional Republicans about the Census Bureau's relationship with embattled community organizing group ACORN recently led the agency to put an end to the group's involvement in outreach for the upcoming national count. Groves called use of census data in reapportionment, the process of determining how many seats there will be in the House of Representatives, an "inherently, explicitly political" use of his agency's information that "is proper, that's constitutional, the founders thought about it.
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"It's my firm belief that the basis of credibility of the Census rests on the belief of the American public that we are nonpartisan and we're apolitical and we're a professional statistical bureau. "There are tugs on us daily to get into the political fray," Groves said in a press conference at the National Press Club Wednesday. WASHINGTON (CNN) - In the first monthly briefing in the run-up to the start of the 2010 Census, the director of the Census Bureau was frank Wednesday about the constant political pressures his agency is under but the Census Director Robert Groves insisted that the upcoming national count will be conducted in a nonpartisan way.

Groves explained how the Census Bureau estimates an undercount: But Groves told CNN that an updated estimate by his agency indicates a 0.7 percent undercount of Hispanics during last Census in 2000 - an amount the director said was not statistically significant. Groves participated in a press conference Thursday where a coalition of groups in the Latino community announced a national outreach campaign to encourage Hispanics to be a part of the 2010 Census.Īt the event, the coalition asserted that Hispanics had been undercounted by "around 3 percent" in the 2000 count. You have to prepare for it and we don't have tools to adjust, so we're not going to adjust this Census."Īsked again about the issue, Groves reiterated that "we're not producing adjusted numbers." "There'll be no adjustment of this census," Census Bureau Director Robert Groves told CNN in an interview, "It's not something you can just do. WASHINGTON (CNN)– As outreach efforts begin to ramp up for the 2010 Census, the head of the Census Bureau said Thursday that there are no plans to adjust the result of the upcoming national count to account for possible undercounting of Latinos or other groups. Census forms ask all Americans to describe everyone who is living in their household as of April 1, and some cities will host rallies on April 1 in an attempt to get as many Americans as possible to mail in their completed census questionnaires. The survey's Thursday morning release comes on National Census Day. "In 2000, only 18 percent said the census was an invasion of privacy and only 14 percent thought it was a waste of money." "These numbers are virtually unchanged from a decade ago," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. And 83 percent of people questioned in the poll say they don't consider the census an invasion of their privacy. Washington (CNN) - Americans overwhelmingly say that the census is useful and not an invasion of their privacy, according to a new national poll.Ī CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey indicates that 80 percent of the public says that the census is useful, with just one in four saying the census is a waste of money.
