322
Opinion of the Court
would be entitled." 2 U. S. C. § 2a(a). Within 15 days thereafter, the Clerk of the House of Representatives must "send to the executive of each State a certificate of the number of Representatives to which such State is entitled." 2 U. S. C. § 2a(b) (1994 ed., Supp. III).
The instant dispute centers on the problem of "under-count" in the decennial census. For the last few decades, the Bureau has sent census forms to every household, which it asked residents to complete and return. The Bureau followed up on the mailing by sending enumerators to personally visit all households that did not respond by mail. Despite this comprehensive effort to reach every household, the Bureau has always failed to reach—and has thus failed to count—a portion of the population. This shortfall has been labeled the census "undercount."
The Bureau has been measuring the census undercount rate since 1940, and undercount has been the subject of public debate at least since the early 1970's. See M. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History 221-222 (1988). It has been measured in one of two ways. Under one method, known as "demographic analysis," the Bureau develops an independent estimate of the population using birth, death, immigration, and emigration records. U. S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Report to Congress: The Plan for Census 2000, p. 2, and n. 1 (Aug. 1997) (hereinafter Census 2000 Report). A second method, first used in 1990, involves a large sample survey, called the "Post-Enumeration Survey," that is conducted in conjunction with the decennial census. The Bureau compares the information gathered during the survey with the information obtained in the census and uses the comparison to estimate the number of unenumerated people in the census. See National Research Council, Modernizing the U. S. Census 30-31 (B. Edmonston & C. Schultze eds. 1995).
Some identifiable groups—including certain minorities, children, and renters—have historically had substantially
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