What Are The Odds The Census Information Will Be Correct?

They spent nearly a billion dollars for nothing:

A computer system that the Census Bureau needs to manage its door-to-door count of the U.S. population remained buggy and prone to crash a day before enumerators were set to begin their work, government officials said Friday.

The bureau's Paper Based Operations Control System did not function reliably in tests and, despite hardware and software upgrades, "may not be able to perform as needed under full operational loads," the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a report.

"So far, it is not as stable as it needs to be," GAO Strategic Issues Director Robert Goldenkoff said before the start of a congressional hearing on the census.

The paper-based system's hasty design began in early 2008, after the census bureau scrapped plans to use a handheld-computer method that ended up costing more than $700 million but did not operate adequately.

The system will generate assignments for the roughly 635,000 enumerators hired to visit about 48 million homes to tally people who did not return their census forms by mail.

Instead of getting instructions from the cell-phone like handheld machines, enumerators will receive assignments on printouts.

Returning to paper-based method boosted the cost of the census by about $3 billion that using the handheld computers was supposed to have saved.

What a mess. Because the census numbers will be used to determine how a great deal of federal money is spent, not to mention how our representatives are apportioned, there's all kinds of reasons for certain people to mess with the numbers.