"The Supreme Court today upheld the validity of the 1990 census, ruling unanimously that the federal government had no constitutional obligation to adjust the results to correct an acknowledged undercount in big cities and among minorities . . . . At the core of the legal challenge to the 1990 census was the racially disparate undercount, the existence of which no one disputed. The census missed about 2 percent of the population as a whole, some four million people. But it missed 4.8 percent of the Black population and 5.2 percent of the Hispanic population."
-- From The New York Times, 3/21/1996 Issue ℗ 1996 The New York Times. (All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.)
The situation described is important because census data are used to:
