Sean Patrick Maloney: “last week the Subcommittee on the Census held a hearing on the 1990 census, and once again, the record is full of…”

“last week the Subcommittee on the Census held a hearing on the 1990 census, and once again, the record is full of mistakes. Let me, once again, put the facts on the table so that Congress can make its decisions on what really happened. Some of the errors at the hearing are because most of the members and staff on the Republican side are new to the issue, and get confused about which facts apply to 1990 and which to previous censuses. Some of the errors occurred because two of the three statisticians who testified had no previous experience with the census undercount issue. It is often useful to get fresh minds to think about a problem, but in this case it also resulted in people making statements when they did not have the facts to support their position. At last week's hearing the statement was made that in 1990 50 percent of the undercount came from problems in the address list. That is wrong. The facts are that in 1990 70 percent of those missed were in households that were counted, and the address list was 97.5 percent accurate. One of the witnesses criticized the Post Enumeration Survey because it put more people into the census than other methods said were missing. That too is wrong. The problem with the Post Enumeration Survey in 1990 was that despite the Census Bureau's best efforts, it will missed people.”