480
Opinion of O'Connor, J.
its use, and its conclusion that we otherwise have jurisdiction to consider that challenge, I would find that the Bureau's use of imputation constituted a form of sampling and thus was prohibited by § 195 of the Census Act, 13 U. S. C. § 1 et seq. Therefore, while I concur in Parts I and II of the majority's opinion, I respectfully dissent from Part III and have no occasion to decide whether the Constitution prohibits imputation, which the majority addresses in Part IV.
I
To conduct the year 2000 census, the Census Bureau (Bureau) first created a master address file that attempted to list every residential housing unit in the United States. See U. S. Dept. of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Admin., Census 2000 Operational Plan VI (Dec. 2000) (hereinafter Census 2000 Operational Plan). The Bureau then conducted a survey of every address on that list, primarily through the use of mail-back questionnaires. See id., at IX.A to IX.E; ante, at 457. As relevant here, these questionnaires requested the name of each person living at a given address. See Census 2000 Operational Plan V.B.
Because not every address returned a questionnaire, the Bureau had its enumerators attempt to contact nonresponding addresses up to six times by phone or in person in an effort to obtain population information for each address. See Declaration of Howard Hogan ¶ 73, App. 285 (hereinafter Hogan); Census 2000 Operational Plan IX.G. This was known as "nonresponse followup." Ibid. Also during this followup procedure, addresses that appeared vacant were marked as such while addresses determined to be nonexistent were noted for later deletion. See Hogan ¶¶ 69, 73, App. 283, 285. When all followup procedures were completed, the Bureau still lacked population information for approximately 0.4% of the addresses on the master address list because the Bureau had been unable to classify them as either "occupied, vacant, or nonexistent." Id., at 188. Additionally, the
Page: Index Previous 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007