Via a FB friend:
As of April 1, 2006, out of a 2004 Census estimated population of 18 in Teterboro, there were 39 registered voters (216.7% of the population, vs. 55.4% in all of Bergen County).
Sadly, the answer may be prosaic. From earlier in the same Wikipedia entry:
The 2000 census failed to count any of the residents of the Vincent Place housing units who had moved into the newly built homes in 1999. The uncounted residents, including the Mayor and all four Council members, would help make up a projected tripling of the population enumerated by the census.
{ 9 comments }
Witt 09.27.09 at 2:52 am
Keep in mind that a “2004 Census estimated” number is actually an American Community Survey number. Whereas the Census conducted only every 10 years and is an actual enumeration (i.e., they try to count everybody) supplemented with sampling, the ACS is conducted *every* year, but is just a sample.
It’s very common in the ACS to see ridiculous margins of error in subpopulations — e.g., foreign born in County X are 42, with a margin of error of 106. What, there are negative 64 people living there? Really?
I know this is a humorless response, but I’ve talked a number of reporters out of relying on such baloney numbers, so I worry when I see things like this repeated uncritically. Especially in an environment in which there is boiling rhetoric from both the right and the left against the upcoming 2010 Census.
mollymooly 09.27.09 at 6:42 am
From Wikipedia’s article on Monowi, Nebraska:
Kieran Healy 09.27.09 at 12:19 pm
Keep in mind that a “2004 Census estimated†number is actually an American Community Survey number. Whereas the Census conducted only every 10 years and is an actual enumeration
Yes, I know all this. My first thought was that the housing unit estimation method would have led to the error, but then I saw the bit at the top of the entry that the Census had just missed a bunch of people in the enumeration to begin with.
Witt 09.27.09 at 2:31 pm
Sorry, I didn’t really mean that you personally didn’t know the difference. When I said I was being humorless, I meant that I saw your post as a funny Facebook exchange between two people who already know the unreliability of the data, and my comment was intended to lay out the un-funny practical reasons for such a result, for the benefit of CT readers who aren’t already familiar with them.
I’m probably a bit touchy on this because I keep talking to enumerators who are running into anti-Census bias. It’s so easy for stuff like this to segue into “Ha HA, isn’t New Jersey corrupt, and by the way you can’t trust Obama’s census either,” and then we see something like what happened with ACORN last year, where voter registration applications that they flagged as potentially invalid somehow get defined in the US media as “ACORN trying to commit voter fraud.”
Salient 09.27.09 at 2:35 pm
Especially in an environment in which there is boiling rhetoric from both the right and the left against the upcoming 2010 Census.
and the left? …really? where?
Witt 09.27.09 at 2:50 pm
Don’t have time to find the link now, because I’m running out the door to work, but there’s a lot of rhetoric in some of the Hispanic press about the need to boycott the census to show Hispanic power and thus create pressure for immigration reform. There’s more to it, but again I’m running. Will try to come back tonight with links.
Matthew Ernest 09.27.09 at 7:28 pm
“It’s very common in the ACS to see ridiculous margins of error in subpopulations—e.g., foreign born in County X are 42, with a margin of error of 106. What, there are negative 64 people living there? Really?”
That’s not so much a ridiculous margin as it it a ridiculous interpretation of a distribution that we know won’t be quite normal because of the hard minimum. Sure, it may be more precise to state the upper and lower bounds of the error separately rather than as an error range, but I’d be willing to bet that someone has to stuff the data into a table that couldn’t accommodate the additional field.
Witt 09.27.09 at 10:46 pm
OK, a couple of links on the proposed census boycott.
The Boston Globe:
The proposed boycott – organized this spring by the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, a group based in Washington that represents 20,000 churches nationwide, including 300 in Massachusetts – is stirring deep divisions among immigrant communities. It faces stiff opposition from a string of advocacy groups, including the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, the Service Employees International Union, and the Brazilian Immigrant Center. To this point, the boycott effort has revolved mainly around word-of-mouth, talk radio, and blog entries by some members of participating churches.
And Wisconsin Public Radio has the same story.
It’s been the subject of vigorous debate in the Spanish-language press since at least February. The outreach people I talked to most recently were bemoaning the fact that some politicians are telling people not to participate. I would have assumed that they meant the right-wing ones, but the outreach area they work in is heavily Democratic, so who knows.
eli Rabett 09.28.09 at 12:26 am
Hell, the US has a rotten state problem and I don’t mean Texas. California has over 35 million people and WY, VT, AL, ND, SD, DE and MT have less than 1. Fold VT in with NH, sell Alaska back to the Russians, combine ND and SD, merge DE and MD and MT and WY. Give the extra senate seats to CA, TX, NY and FL. It’s almost party neutral.
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