By Will Bettmann

During the outlandish freak show that passed for the last presidential election in this country, I heard a lot of Utahns voice their opinions that Gore was a sore loser, and that he should just give up and cede the election to Bush.

Now that Utah is fighting to gain a fourth congressional seat, I have heard no complaining about recounts despite the fact that Utah has already had one case rejected by the Supreme Court, and is pursuing yet another.

After Al Gore lost one case before the Supreme Court, he gave up. But not Utah. We are all about the recount now, by golly.

I actually believe there is some merit to Utah's current case, which the Supreme Court heard two weeks ago, and is expected to rule on later this spring. What I object to is the hypocrisy of so many Utah Republicans. It would have been a lot more honest to say, "I despise Al Gore, and I don't care what it takes for him not to be our next president, just so long as he does not win." Instead, most of the people I talked to seemed to argue that the process was fair and that one count was enough. Why is that not the case with the census?

Now for the facts of the case: Congress apportions congressional seats to states based on data from the complete census that is conducted every 10 years. Based on numbers from the 2000 census, Utah lost an extra congressional seat to North Carolina by 856 people. However, the census bureau used a method called "imputation" to count people whom they were unable to contact. By this method, if census workers couldn't contact a household, they would "impute" the number of people that household based on the actual number of peopel in other houses nearby.

Utah's argument before the Supreme Court last week was that imputation is a form of statistical sampling, which the Court ruled in 1999 was unconstitutional, saying that the census bureau must use "actual enumeration," to gather its data, even in cases when sampling produced more accurate results.

A simpler way of putting it is, "What should the census bureau people count when they come to a house with the lights on, a car in the driveway, but they can't make contact with anyone inside?" But on the other hand, what if a house is abandoned, or a vacation home?

The same methods were used to count people in both states, but there were around 26,000 more "imputed" people in North Carolina than in Utah, so if the Supreme Court rules that the imputation method is invalid, Utah will gain a congressional seat. That ruling could also throw the upcoming congressional elections into chaos since congressional districts have already been drawn up, and could be challenged in a number of states if imputed census numbers are invalid.

In an extensive study of ballots from Florida, a group of newspapers and other organizations found that under certain circumstances, Al Gore would have won a recount. For example, if ballots in every county in Florida were recounted, Gore would have won. My question is this: if Utah can succeed (and it may) in overturning the results of the 2000 census, and thereby potentially re-ordering congressional districts throughout the country, why then is George Bush still in the Oval Office?

MS
MS

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