

Ask HN: Citizen Census. What do you think? - zeynel1

I read in the news that the United States Census Bureau spent over 11 billion dollars for the 2011 census (35 dollars per person) and still could not get it right. The Census Bureau refuses to use online forms because it says it would be more expensive.<p>I just put together this online form http://citizencensus.appspot.com/ and wrote this rant http://citizencensus.appspot.com/about to justify citizen census for a recount of New York City census. Let me know what you think.
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natnat
I worked as a manager in the USCB for a few months last year, so I think I can
give a little insight as to why the Census is so expensive, and why we didn't
use an online form.

Virtually all of the money spent taking the Census was on enumerating non-
responding households, hiring people to go door-to-door to count people. Only
a few million were spend mailing out forms.

The problem with online submissions is that it's quite difficult to uniquely
identify people online, and a large portion of the population doesn't use
computers. It's also expensive to go through records of people who submitted
both online and mail-in forms with slightly different entries and determine
what is and isn't a duplicate.

Government software projects are also very expensive. I know you could throw
this thing together in about an hour, but this isn't the same thing as the US
Census. The Census doesn't get to assume that everyone uses a Google account
that's tied directly to their real-life identity, and they need assurance that
their software is extremely secure. It doesn't justify the obscene prices many
contractors charge, but keep in mind that most corporations overpay for
software, too (e.g. Oracle database)

There's a reason the government doesn't offer to pay people to turn in their
census forms. It incentivizes people to turn in multiple forms, making the
count less accurate.

There's also not much utility to a form that anyone can customize. Sometimes,
when you're dealing with 310 million people, it's easier to treat them as
cattle even if they really are all unique snowflakes.

~~~
zeynel1
Thank for this insightful comment. Do you think, online form would work to
count a relatively small section of the population, such as New York City?

 _The problem with online submissions is that it's quite difficult to uniquely
identify people online,_

Does the census form ask the social security number of the person? Social
Security number would uniquely identify individual online or offline.

 _and a large portion of the population doesn't use computers._

According to this [http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-
wdi&met=it_net_us...](http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-
wdi&met=it_net_user_p2&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=united+states+internet+usage)
over 75 per cent of the population is online. And this is probably more in New
York City with easy access to internet cafes.

 _It's also expensive to go through records of people who submitted both
online and mail-in forms with slightly different entries and determine what is
and isn't a duplicate._

My proposal is for online form only.

 _The Census doesn't get to assume that everyone uses a Google account that's
tied directly to their real-life identity, and they need assurance that their
software is extremely secure._

Again, can this be solved with asking social security number of people
submitting their forms?

~~~
natnat
I think an online form would be nice if there were a way to ensure we weren't
getting duplicate applications. Unfortunately, there is no unique identifier,
so we would need to go by heuristics, which complicates things enormously.

If you do online-only and only 75% of people are online, you have to hand-
count 25% of the population, which means you'd need about a 70% response rate
with the people online to match what you have with paper forms. That's not
realistic, I don't think. Plus, the people who aren't online tend to be in
remote areas, which are much more expensive to hand-count.

The Census is inefficient in a whole lot of ways, but one thing that makes it
really efficient is standardization. Every one of the ~700k enumerators gets
the same exact kit, every manager gets the same boxes, and everything is
basically made so an idiot can do it. There are two reasons for this: the
first is that it's cheaper, but the second, more important reason is that the
data is consistent from place to place. If people in NY respond online and
people in North Dakota respond by mail, you'll get lots of little statistical
differences that make the data less easy to work with. This the big reason
they need to homogenize everything.

As the other commenter said, the social security number only works for people
who are citizens, but the intent of the census is to count everyone who is
regularly living in the area at the time. It's a tricky thing to define, and I
think a silly one, but it's what the constitution says to do so we do it.

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zeynel1
<http://citizencensus.appspot.com/>

<http://citizencensus.appspot.com/about>

