posted on Nov, 18 2008 @ 04:12 PM
reply to post by unityemissions
The census is far from accurate. Did you send in your census form last time? Did you even get one? The census quite similar to grade school roll
call, except the population isn't sitting conveniently in a classroom where teachers can see who did and did not raise their hands.
Look at the following document...
www.census.gov...
and you'll notice an alarming frequency of terms such as "estimation", "weighting factor", "subsample", so on and so fourth.
The census bureau has three methods used to count.
- Mailout/Mailback
- Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI)
- Computer Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI)
With the exception of addresses in Remote Alaska, the general timing of data collection is:
Month 1: Addresses in sample that are determined to be mailable are sent a questionnaire via the U.S. Postal Service.
Month 2: All mail non-responding addresses with an available phone number are sent to CATI.
Month 3: A sample of mail non-responses without a phone number, CATI non-responses, and unmailable addresses are selected and sent to CAPI.
Given that we know many people don't have a mailing address or telephone, how difficult to you think it would be to miss a significant portion of the
population? I'd say its fairly easy to miss a huge piece of the pie.
I'd go out on a limb and say the population of the US is
anywhere between 300 and 400 million people. Not knocking the Census bureau or
anything, as while technology can aid in the processing of the data, the collection of the data is, by it's very nature a manual process. Because of
this, I think a margin of error of 100 million people is well within reason.