David Thomas: “no, I do not have time to yield. I do not even have enough time to go through the points that I think absolutely need to…”

“no, I do not have time to yield. I do not even have enough time to go through the points that I think absolutely need to be made. If my colleagues will examine what they are asking to do, contrary to current law, is to poll. They use the term ``sampling.'' Sampling is polling. It is creating a piece and then extrapolating to the whole. Their argument is that is more accurate than counting. Have we had infallible counts in the past? No. Are we bound and determined to do a good job? Yes. Is there disagreement right now? Yes. Will we have more information in February and March? Yes. Should we make a decision now? No. When we take a look at polling, sampling simply fills in the blanks. Probably my colleagues saw Jurassic Park, in which they had most of the DNA code, but they had to fill in the blanks with what they thought was the appropriate profile on the DNA code. What these people are asking us to do is to count some Americans and then fill in the rest. But it is more insidious than that, because sampling does not just do that. It is not like normal polling, where they take a random sample and assume the universe from that random sample. What they actually are going to do is count people and then not count them. They are going to replace people who have actually been counted with virtual people that the statisticians make up. And that is not political? Let me talk about politics.…”