Counting America: the U.S. has taken a census every 10 years since 1790, as the constitution requires. So why is the 2010 census sparking such intense debate?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

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With an army of 1.4 million census takers and a budget of $15 billion (yes, billion), the 2010 census is being billed as the largest peacetime mobilization in American history. Planning for the census has been going on for 10 years, and Washington is spending $340 million on a national advertising campaign in 28 languages.

The goal of all this time, money, and effort? Simply to get as many people as possible to fill out the 120 million questionnaires that will begin landing in Americans' mailboxes later this month.

A national head count may sound like a pretty dry exercise, but the census actually has an enormous impact on our daily lives. It determines everything from how many Congressmen your state gets to whether a new Gap opens near your house and which channels cable companies offer in your area.

With so much at stake, it's no surprise that the census generates a good deal of controversy, particularly on the issue of who gets to be counted, where people are counted, and who the census misses in its tally.

It all goes back to the Constitution, which requires the federal government to count the nation's residents every 10 years. Officials say that this year's 10-question form, among the shortest ever, should take about 10 minutes to complete. For the first time, 13 million bilingual questionnaires (in English and Spanish) will be distributed in areas with large numbers of Spanish speakers. Everyone will receive the same questions about age, race, gender, and whether the respondent sometimes lives elsewhere.

"It is a time for all of us, especially social, political, and religious leaders around the country to get the word out that everyone needs to participate," says Census Bureau director Robert Groves.

The census has a huge political impact. It not only determines how many seats states get in the House of Representatives, it also determines how many votes they get in the Electoral College, the mechanism for electing Presidents: Electoral votes are determined by each state's total number of seats in both houses of Congress. So Indiana, for example, has nine seats in the House of Representatives, and two Senators, like every state, for a total of 11 electoral votes.

The census is also used to distribute some $450 billion in federal aid for everything from schools to highways--using population-driven formulas. It also provides the basis for calculating many economic statistics like the poverty and unemployment rates.

All this helps explain why Republicans and Democrats have long disagreed

over how to conduct the census. Almost everyone acknowledges that the traditional method mailback surveys and census workers knocking on doors to follow up--fails to count millions of Americans. The question is what to do about it.

Democrats argue that the solution is to use statistical sampling to extrapolate figures for those who don't get counted. Since minorities, immigrants, the poor, and the homeless are more likely to be undercounted--and to vote Democratic--such sampling would presumably benefit Democrats. Republicans, on the other hand, argue that statistical sampling is unreliable and that the Constitution mandates an actual count.

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"Power and money are linked to how many people live...