[Vision2020] 2010 Census

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Friday 22 January 2010 09:42:17 Art Deco wrote:
> press.docOur property is posted to keep out a number of pests
> including hunters, salespeople, missionaries, religious
> psychopaths, criminals, nosey parkers/porkers, etc.
>
> Can a criminal trespass action be brought against census takers who
> violate the trespassing laws?

I suppose some windmill-tilting lawyer could file such a case, but I 
would not hold much hope for it going very far. Remember that the 
authority for the federal census specified in the US constitution, 
and there are additional federal statutes requiring citizens to 
participate in the census. So a trespassing case against a census 
worker carrying out census taking duties would seem to have a low 
probability of success given the strong federal mandate for the 
census.

On the other hand, if the federal administrative rules under which the 
census is conducted extend guidelines to census workers about which 
practical situations may be excused from that particular census 
worker's visit, that's another matter. In other words, if the feds 
say "We won't push this particular case," that's OK, because it's the 
fed's initiative. But if some citizen decides the feds don't need to 
count anyone at that residence, and the feds do want to count in that 
residence, then the citizen is at a considerable disadvantage.

It may be that there are some citizens who might need, in fact, might 
foolishly prefer, that the individual civilian census worker driving 
a hybrid be replaced by a fully-armored Humvee with half a dozen 
fully-armed special forces personnel, just to get the point across 
that the census data will be collected, whether or not the citizen 
happens to be having a bad-hair day. Fortunately for all of us, there 
are statistically more accurate census estimating techniques that do 
not require such military participation in census-taking, or give the 
opportunity for foolish bravado given such stronger data requests.


Ken