Count Again

So rules a judge on the census

Even before the counting began, Director Vincent Barabba predicted that the 1980 census would be the "toughest and most scrutinized ever." But not even Barabba expected the furor over the Census Bureau's preliminary figures, which have shown big population declines in major Northern cities. Facing the loss of congressional seats and federal funds, which are allocated according to the census, seven cities and states have sued, claiming that the bureau badly undercounted their residents, particularly those in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In Detroit last week, U.S. District Court Judge Horace Gilmore agreed. He ruled that the 1980 census is invalid unless the bureau corrects its figures.

Although Gilmore's ruling applies to the entire 1980 census, the plaintiff before him was just Detroit. The Census Bureau's preliminary figures indicated that the city's population had decreased by nearly 24% in ten years, to 1.2 million. But Mayor Coleman Young's staff, basing their estimates on the number of occupied housing units in the city, argued that Barabba's enumerators missed 120,000 people, most of them blacks in the city's ghettos. Unless the figures are corrected, argued Young's lawyers, one of Michigan's 19 congressional seats will be unfairly taken away, and Detroit will lose more than $30 million a year in federal grants.

Government lawyers contended that the Census Bureau, which acknowledges that in 1970 it overlooked 5.3 million people, about 2.5% of the U.S. population, had spent more than $1 billion on advertising and other efforts to make the 1980 count more accurate. They added that adjusting the figures as demanded by Detroit and other cities would cause the bureau to miss the Jan. 1 deadline set by Congress for reporting the count.*

Gilmore brushed aside the deadline as beside the point. Of far more importance to him was Detroit's persuasive case that its citizens had been undercounted, which he said "gives rise to a constitutional violation of the one-person, one-vote principle." He ordered the bureau to produce a "statistically defensible" method within 30 days to correct the count. Barabba is considering whether to urge the Justice Department to appeal the decision. But just in case, he set associates to work on finding a way to carry out the order.

* Many Congressmen would just as soon have the deadline forgotten. The House already has passed legislation to delay reapportionment until 1982.

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