Supreme Court Roundup; Justices to Hear Utah's Challenge to Procedure in 2000 Census (original) (raw)
U.S.|Supreme Court Roundup; Justices to Hear Utah's Challenge to Procedure in 2000 Census
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- Jan. 23, 2002
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January 23, 2002
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With the size of two state Congressional delegations in the balance, the Supreme Court agreed today to hear Utah's challenge to a statistical method used by the 2000 census that cost the state a new House seat.
There is no dispute about what happened. Utah's loss was North Carolina's gain because of a decades-old method known as imputation, under which addresses on the Census Bureau's master list where no one has been contacted after multiple efforts are assigned a number of occupants based on data collected from households in the immediate vicinity.
Imputation, which has been used in one way or another since the 1940 census, added 1.2 million people to the 2000 count, accounting for 0.4 percent of the total population. The technique worked to the relative disadvantage of Utah, where residents are easy to find and just 0.2 percent of the count was imputed. Utah fell 857 people short of qualifying for a new fourth seat in the House, a seat that under the formula used to allocate representatives then became a new 13th seat for North Carolina.
The case presents a two-pronged question for the Supreme Court. The first is whether the use of imputed figures is legal under the Census Act of 1957, which the court has interpreted to prohibit the use of statistical sampling for purposes of apportionment.
That raises the question of whether imputation is sampling. A special three-judge federal district court in Salt Lake City voted 2 to 1 on Nov. 1 that it is not. But the state insists in its appeal, Utah v. Evans, No. 01-714, that it is.
The second question for the Supreme Court is whether anything other than an old-fashioned head count is constitutional, given the Constitution's reference in the census clause of Article I, Section 2 to an ''actual enumeration'' for purposes of apportionment.
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