Did Census Double-Count the Homeless?

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (The previous sentence was modified in the 14th Amendment, section 2.)

With those words in the US Constitution, our founding fathers created the Census. What sometimes seems like a futile effort to count heads, the census is supposed to be one of our guarantors of one-man-one-vote by ensuring that congressional seats are doled out fairly. That's why it is so important to have an accurate census count.

Over the past year the Democrats have been monkeying with the census rules in the attempt to skew the results toward liberal districts.. The biggest of which the striking down of an amendment that would allow the census bureau to screen out illegal immigrants.

Now we find that the census bureau may have done some double counting of the homeless,and it was intentional.

U.S. Census Bureau Director Dr. Robert Groves told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the Census has “no way, unfortunately, of knowing whether or not homeless individuals were counted twice,” and added, “we may have duplicates.”

However, back on June 10, CNSNews.com reported that the Office of the Inspector General (IG) overseeing the Census Bureau had published a report indicating that Census workers were instructed by a Census manual to recount people who said they had already been counted.


The IG report also revealed that the enumerators, the workers who count people for the Census, were not required to collect homeless persons’ names and birth dates.

During a conference call hosted at the National Press Club on Wednesday, CNSNews.com asked Dr. Groves, “What process is the Census using to remove duplicated records of homeless individuals who were recounted by enumerators and for which no name, birth date, or ethnicity information was collected?”

The May 5 IG report showed that a Census manual for counting the homeless “indicates that enumerators should recount any individual who asserts that he/she has already been counted.”


“Unique to this operation, enumerators were allowed to create an individual Census record based on their direct observation of the race, gender and ethnicity of the respondent,” the OIG reported. “Enumerators were not required to obtain names or dates of birth from such respondents.”


“When deviating from established procedures, enumerators appeared to follow a more common-sense approach to reducing the risk of duplicate records,” concluded the OIG report. “However, this risk remains great for individual records created during [homeless count enumeration]. We have not reviewed the process Census will use to remove duplicate records for enumerations that were simply based on direct observation of race, gender, age or ethnicity, and in which no birth date or name was provided.”

A transcript of the exchange between Census Director Dr. Robert Groves and CNSNews.com follows below:

Dr. Groves: “It’s a great question. So let me paraphrase the question to make sure that I’m doing it right. We attempt to count those folks that are non-traditionally housed, including those who live and sleep in outdoor locations in a special operation, three days at the end of March. This is a very challenging thing, if you think about it for a minute.


“The way we do it is to both visit service providers where the homeless would seek services – soup kitchens, health services, shelters and so on – on a couple of days and then one night we actually go to outdoor locations. It is feasible as the caller noted that we would count someone both at a soup kitchen on Monday and then we would visit an encampment or a group of people sleeping under an overpass the next day.


“When we visit them in the evening it is very common that those people are worried about their own safety and they protect themselves in various ways to make sure they’re not harmed physically. It is common that when we visit those outdoor locations that we can’t get the names and age and race of each individual. They say essentially ‘we don’t want to talk to you.’


“As a last resort in those cases we, we enumerate them, we count, we write down ‘Person 1, Person 2’ – that’s about the best we can do. What the caller notes is sometimes person number 13 under the overpass may have been counted in the soup kitchen.


“We have no way, unfortunately, of knowing that in that circumstance. That’s a weakness in the enumeration of homeless people, we may have duplicates. We also know that we have a lot of missed homeless. We do not even attempt to measure homeless people who lived by themselves in a tent deep in the woods miles from anyone else -- we don’t know they’re there. We rely on local officials and local community organizers to find clusters of homeless, and that’s the way we do it. This is a weakness in the homeless count.”

Along with the counting of illegals, the fake ACORN voters and of course the Department of  Justice belief that the right to vote only applies to African-Americans, this latest census action is warning that the principal of one-man-one-vote so crucial to our republic, may be in serious danger.