WASHINGTON — The government expressed confidence Wednesday that official 2010 census results reflected high levels of accuracy, with signs of improvement from 2000.
At a news briefing, Census Bureau director Robert Groves said the official census tally of 308.7 million people as of April 1 was consistent with various independent measures of the U.S. population, such as those based on birth and death records.
He also said preliminary analysis indicated the Census Bureau may have matched or boosted its accuracy from 2000, based on strong mail-in participation rates and a reduction of duplicates in its address list.
Historically, the once-a-decade population count has disproportionately missed minorities, particularly poor people in dense cities, as well as children. In 2000, the bureau noted for the first time an overcount of 1.3 million people, due mostly to duplicate counts of more affluent whites with multiple residences. About 4.5 million people were ultimately missed, mostly blacks and Latinos.
On Wednesday, Groves acknowledged that census workers in some urban and low-income areas had difficulty getting responses from people; in those cases, building managers were queried to get the information.
Groves said while there has never been a perfect census, three different analyses suggested “a measurable improvement over the 2000 census.”
“These are preliminary, but it’s heartwarming when we see this,” he said.
Additional details on census accuracy are expected to become available as local-level statistics are released this year, but a full assessment won’t be known until 2012. Last month, the Census Bureau reported the nation’s population was 308,745,538, up from 281.4 million a decade ago.
