Census Accuracy Report Shakes Up Municipal Challenges

The U.S. Census Bureau thinks it did a pretty good job back in 2010. The agency recently released the results of a post-Census analysis showing that its decennial count of the country was nearly as accurate as intended, with only a slight overcount that is not statistically significant.

That's great news for an entity with the complicated task of counting everyone in the entire country. But the Census Bureau's seeming success may be a bit disheartening to more than 100 cities across the country that have formally challenged the Bureau's results, arguing that their populations are larger – and sometimes much larger. According to this analysis, those cities are wasting their time. If anything, the Bureau says, it may have overcounted the nation's population by a small margin.