WASHINGTON - The 2010 census missed more than 1.5 million minorities after struggling to count blacks, Hispanics, renters and young men, but was mostly accurate, the government said Tuesday.
The Census Bureau released an extensive assessment of its high-stakes, once-a-decade head count of the U.S. population. The government analysis, based on a sample survey, has been a source of political controversy in the past over whether to "statistically adjust" census results to correct for undercounts, which usually involve minorities who tend to vote Democratic.
The findings show the 2010 census overcounted the total U.S. population by 36,000 people, or 0.01 percent, due mostly to duplicate counts of affluent whites owning multiple homes. That is an improvement from a census over-count of 0.5 percent in 2000.
However, the census missed about 2.1 percent of black Americans and 1.5 percent of Hispanics, together accounting for 1.5 million people. The percentages are statistically comparable to 2000, despite an aggressive advertising and minority outreach effort in 2010 that pushed total census costs to an unprecedented $15 billion.
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Also undercounted were about 5 percent of American Indians living on reservations and nearly 2 percent of minorities who marked themselves as "some other race."
"While the overall coverage of the census was exemplary, the traditional hard-to-count groups, like renters, were counted less well," Census Bureau director Robert Groves said. "Because ethnic and racial minorities disproportionately live in hard-to-count circumstances, they, too, were undercounted relative to the majority population.
"Our belief is that without our outreach, our numbers would have been much, much worse," he added.
The South, led by the District of Columbia, Texas, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, was more likely to have people who were missed. The Midwest and Northeast as a whole posted small overcounts.
