Kenneth Prewitt Quotations

The first presidential veto, by George Washington, was a veto of Alexander Hamilton's formula for apportioning the House, and the one that Washington preferred was one that Thomas Jefferson produced, and that was one partisan issue. The apportionment formula that Jefferson produced gave an extra seat to Virginia. Everybody knew what that game was. Look, partisan interest in the census is simply nothing new.

It's seriously unfortunate when an elected official of the federal government says she's [Michelle Bachmann] going to deliberately break the law. I don't know what kind of signal she thinks that sends, but if she believes that's a good signal, I'm sad for the country. I think that it's deeply, deeply, unfortunate that a member of Congress would, in effect, invite other people who feel that way to say, "Well, I don't have to do it either."

The actual assertion that the Census Bureau could behave in such a way as to tilt things one way or the other way in the partisan sense, is, on the face of it, a silly charge. It's the same Census Bureau that's considered to be incompetent by some people, and then some of the same people are saying that this incompetent agency is so clever and so Machiavellian that it can design a census for partisan reasons.

One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically.

It is ... a complicated, challenging task. But the alternative is to just ignore them -- is to say, 'Well, even though we didn't count them and we know they are part of the United States, since we don't know where to put them, we'll just sort of leave them off the census rolls. That strikes us as a social injustice.

The census is a scientific effort. We know that a census number is an estimate. It's not the truth,

And then we have attitudinal issues. We have people who are skeptical, indifferent, apathetic, don't want to cooperate. And we have people who are outright hostile and will refuse to be counted, ... So there is no way we will get to 100 percent. Our best estimate right now is that we are going to run harder to stay in place.

are groups not likely to use the Internet.

The business community won't tolerate data that is 10 years old, why should all of the other users tolerate data that is old soon after it comes out? ... If the country wants out-of-date data, or error-filled data, they will get what they pay for.

Never have we been so diverse, never have we been so many and never have we been so carefully measured.