Kendrick Meek: “first of all, I do not trust statistics any more than the rest of my colleagues. But I trust even less the belief that…”

“first of all, I do not trust statistics any more than the rest of my colleagues. But I trust even less the belief that everyone is going to be counted fairly. If we look at the history of this, we have never had an accurate count. The under-count has been shown more in African Americans than it has in any other group. Do we want this repeated? Then we are sending a message that we do not want a fair census count. This country does not look like it did in 1990. You better look around and see that it is different. You see more minorities. There will be even more. So you may as well learn that you have to count them accurately. You cannot count them accurately by the kinds of enumeration that you are doing or that you expect to do. So it tells me that the issue is that because you know there are more of them than there are of you, that you do not want an accurate count. They are going to be there. They are going to be under the bridges. They are going to be in the homeless shelters. There are going to be people who do not return those things to the census. All I am saying to you is, it is fruitless, it is crazy, it is a waste of money, but you would rather do that politically and for power than to go to a sampling which the Mollohan amendment is asking us to do. You would rather take that useless method because you do not want to count everybody. You want to go back to the time when there was a serious undercount. It will repeat itself.”