Sean Patrick Maloney: “My amendment will fix some of the underlying problems of the bill that is before us. But, in the final analysis, this is…”

“My amendment will fix some of the underlying problems of the bill that is before us. But, in the final analysis, this is a very bad bill and should be defeated. There are three things wrong with H.R. 472. First, it calls for a repeat of a failed program in the past. Second, it does not address the fundamental failure of the 1990 census, the large undercount for minorities. Third, this bill will prevent the Census Bureau from being able to correct the final population counts for the millions of errors that are inevitable. The supporters of this bill have proudly claimed that it makes permanent the local review program from the 1990 census. Why would we want to make permanent a program that failed miserably in 1990? Let us look at the record on post-census local review. Only 16 percent of local governments participated. The additions to the address list amounted to less than one-tenth of 1 percent. That means that more than 99.9 percent of the address lists went unchanged. Local review had a nearly 20 percent error rate. That means that one out of every five addresses added to the census was wrong, thus making the census less accurate.”