Imputation: Adding People to the Census – The Fraud on the American People

June 29, 2011
Q. My wife and I did not receive the 2010 census form and were not polled/interviewed/counted. How many U.S. residents were missed in the census?
The 2010 Census certainly did miss some people; in that respect, it is like every other census. The Census Bureau conducted an independent follow-up survey in order to estimate how many people were not included.

THIS CENSUS WAS A FRAUD ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Released: May 4, 2011

By D’Vera Cohn

When census-takers can’t reach anyone at a particular address or obtain information about occupants in other ways, they sometimes use a last-resort statistical technique called “imputation” to fill in missing data. One marker of the quality of a census is how much it relies on imputation to add people to the count.

So to meet the goal of having a complete and accurate census, the Census Bureau imputes the existence and number of people living at the address in question, a procedure known as “count imputation.” (The other kind of imputation, called “characteristic imputation,” is when the Census Bureau has a head count for an address but is missing race, age or other personal information.) The number of imputed people tends to be higher among hard-to-count groups such as ethnic and racial minorities.

In 2010, according to figures supplied by the Census Bureau, 1,163,462 people were added to the household population (the total excluding group quarters) via count imputation, or .39% (less than one half of one percent) of the total. This served to boost the household population to slightly more than 300 million; pre-imputation, it stood at 299,594,753.