So Far, Census Return Rate Up to 54 Percent

(April 1) -- Mailing back your census form costs the federal government 42 cents in bulk postage. Not mailing it costs $57 and then some.

Census officials used today's official Census Day to tout the civic value of filling out the form and the costs of not doing so. Census figures are used to allot everything from congressional seats to highway repair funds, from teaching slots to Walmart locations.

So far, about 54 percent of households have turned in the questionnaire. That's not nearly good enough, according to the U.S. Constitution, which requires that everyone be counted every 10 years.

In 2000, 72 percent of households that received the census form filled it out. The 54 percent figure this year will rise. The April 1 census date is the snapshot of the population on that day, not a deadline. Households can still mail the form in during the next several weeks. After that, the Census Bureau will gear up to send an army of 700,000 census takers out to track down people at addresses that haven't replied.

That's where the average $57 cost comes in. The cost of training, paying and providing mileage for all those census takers comes out to about $57 per household. For every 1 percentage point that doesn't mail in the form, taxpayers have to shell out about $85 million.

Ten years ago, the participation was good enough that the Census Bureau returned $300 million of its budget back to the federal Treasury, bureau spokeswoman Shelly Lowe said. "It would be nice to be able to return that again."

Today, census officials began to wrap up an effort to count homeless people by visiting tent cities and shelters. And President Barack Obama filled out his own family's form and called on people to fill out the questionnaires so that "all Americans get the support they deserve and a voice in our democracy."

It's too early to know what the final rate will be, but census officials see some encouraging signs. A study released today by the Pew Hispanic Center found that 91 percent of foreign-born Hispanics had sent their forms in or planned to. (About 78 percent of U.S.-born Hispanics said they had or will return the form.) Minorities, the poor and people with language barriers have traditionally been undercounted.

The Pew estimate comes after a $133 million federal ad campaign. Along with Super Bowl and Olympic ads that reached a broad audience, the campaign targeted hard-to-reach demographics. About 20 percent of the ads were in media aimed at Hispanics, including Spanish-language broadcasts popular with new immigrants, according to Pew.

Lowe said the census also is trying a new tactic this year -- resending the forms to areas where many people haven't returned the form. "There are significant numbers of people who forgot or misplaced it or threw it away," she said, and census research indicates that mailing out 40 million new forms could improve the participation rate.

Along with the cost of counting, census officials also say there's a cost of not counting everyone.

People who don't fill it out "are short-changing themselves," said Kenneth Prewitt, director of the Census Bureau from 1998 to 2000 and now a professor at Columbia University.

"The biggest challenge of the census is the last 2 or 3 percent. If you miss those people and they are in a given demographic group or geographic area, it's not fair," Prewitt said

Communities or demographic groups will get fewer government services and less political representation if they fail to return the forms in disproportionate percentages. Census data determines representation in Congress, state legislatures and even local elected bodies. Businesses deciding where to locate use commercial databases based on census information. And federal aid programs from Medicaid to highway repairs to housing vouchers are based on census data.

About $447 billion -- or 15 percent of the federal budget -- is distributed based on census data, according to a recent analysis by Andrew Reamer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. States also use the data to hand out aid such as school funding.

Reamer said state budgets are hurting these days, so how much federal aid they get based on the census also affects whether they have to raise taxes or cut back on services.