"What is happening now is that those cities must care for all their citizens but they don't get a proportional amount of money [to do so]," Rubin says.

Representatives from New York City, for example, are rallying in support of a bill sponsored by Rep. Mervyn Dymally (D.-Calif.), which will force the Census Bureau to use statistical adjustments in the 2000 census. The bill is receiving such support, according to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, because New York City officials estimate that the 1980 census missed more than 800,000 New York residents, causing the metropolis to lose $25 million in federal funding.

In other states, such as California, where a high number of illegal immigrants refuse to respond to the national census, cities are not receiving enough federal funding to provide adequate social services for their residents, since federal money is doled out based on a falsely low federal head-count.

"The mayors feel it is to their advantage to adjust the census. Right now they are getting fewer dollars, even if the census misses by just 1 percent," says Howard Hogan, a member of the Commerce Department's statistics division.

Rubin emphasizes that the Census Bureau does not share any of its population information with other federal departments, such as welfare agencies.

District Deviance

Congressmen are arguing that statistical adjustments be made to reform current census counting problems for another reason. They say that without fair adjustment for incorrect population data, state congressional districts are inaccurately drawn, leading to misrepresentation in Congress.

In 1980, for example, the state of Indiana argued that if the census count were adjusted in a more accurate fashion, such as according to Rubin's methods, it would have received an additional seat in the House of Representatives and Florida would have lost a space.

Indiana sued the Census Bureau because of this problem seven years ago, though the case was decided in favor of the Bureau in 1983.

In addition, some Democratic congressmen argue that because districts which are not counted accurately tend to be inhabited mostly by minority populations and because those areas are thus underrepresented in Congress, the Democrats are not receiving the representation they deserve.

A Political Struggle

Efforts to readjust the 1990 census have caused much political debate in the past few months.

Last October, the Reagan Administration decided to reject Rubin's new statistical methods and will not adjust the 1990 census data. James Gorman, a spokesman for the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, explains, the "point was that the Census Bureau would be open to the accusation that it was manipulating figures. Also, no one was sure if [the new technique] would be operational by 1990. Some people say it's not possible to take an accurate survey of 300,000 after the 1990 census and to give it to the president, according to law, by 1991."

David Freedman, professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, testified last summer to the House Subcommitee on the Census and Population that new statistical techniques are more difficult to implement in a census than it may first appear.

"The answer is another clever idea: matching sample persons against the census, to see if they were counted. That is easy to say, but not so easy to do, because the sample will have about 300,000 persons, and the population will be around 250,000,000. The practical result is that a sample person can go unmatched by error," Freedman says.