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Ask HN: Citizen Census. What do you think?

by zeynel1 on 4/3/11, 9:18 PM with 5 comments

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.

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.

  • by natnat on 4/3/11, 10:35 PM

    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.

  • by zeynel1 on 4/3/11, 9:19 PM