The Census count officially begins today with a choreographed event in a remote Alaskan village, where U.S. Census Director Robert Groves will hand-deliver a questionnaire to the first of roughly 300 million Americans.
Traveling by dogsled to Noorvik, a tiny Eskimo village north of the frigid Arctic Circle, Groves and other Census officials will take part in a ceremony that includes traditional dancing and cooking.
Then, they will hand-deliver the 10-question survey to 88-year-old Clifton Jackson, a World War II veteran and the oldest resident of Noorvic, according to media reports.
The (sled) dog & pony show is happening long before the April 1 deadline because Alaska's gigantic footprint (it's more than twice the size of Texas), tiny population of less than 700,000, and treacherous terrain poses a major challenge to the Census workers who must knock on doors.
In many cases, the questionnaires cannot be mailed to Alaskans in the hinterlands, because Census forms must be filled out where people live, not where they pick up their mail, according to USA Today.
At $15 billion, this year's U.S. Census budget nearly triples the outlay for 2000, yet some Census officials fear this year's count may miss even more people than the last. According to official Census estimates, the 2000 Census count missed about 1 percent of the population.
In the upcoming February edition of Hispanic Business Magazine, Kenneth Prewitt, head of the U.S. Census count in 2000 and a professor at Columbia University, talks about how the tensions surrounding illegal immigration could render this year's effort even more difficult than the 2000 count.
