Wisconsin v. City of New York, 517 U.S. 1, 7 (1996)

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Cite as: 517 U. S. 1 (1996)

Opinion of the Court

The undercount is not thought to be spread consistently across the population: Some segments of the population are "undercounted" to a greater degree than are others, resulting in a phenomenon termed the "differential undercount." Since at least 1940, the Census Bureau has thought that the undercount affects some racial and ethnic minority groups to a greater extent than it does whites. In 1940, for example, when the undercount for the entire population was 5.4%, the undercount for blacks was estimated at 8.4% (and the under-count for whites at 5.0%). Ibid. The problem of the differential undercount has persisted even as the census has come to provide a more numerically accurate count of the population. In the 1980 census, for example, the overall under-count was estimated at 1.2%, and the undercount of blacks was estimated at 4.9%. Ibid.

The Census Bureau has recognized the undercount and the differential undercount as significant problems, and in the past has devoted substantial effort toward achieving their reduction. Most recently, in its preparations for the 1990 census, the Bureau initiated an extensive inquiry into various means of overcoming the impact of the undercount and the differential undercount. As part of this effort, the Bureau created two task forces: the Undercount Steering Committee, responsible for planning undercount research and policy development; and the Undercount Research Staff (URS), which conducted research into various methods of improving the accuracy of the census. In addition, the Bureau consulted with state and local governments and various outside experts and organizations.

Largely as a result of these efforts, the Bureau adopted a wide variety of measures designed to reduce the rate of

nite and established measure of the population, but rather with estimates of the population developed from demographic data. See App. to Pet. for Cert. in No. 94-1614, pp. 158a-168a, 366a-369a (hereinafter Pet. App.). A similar procedure traditionally has been used to determine the size and makeup of the differential undercount, see infra, at 9-10.

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