The Washington Post’s Carol Morrello reports that a group of black leaders wants the U.S. Census Bureau to count the incarcerated as members of the community they lived in before they were sent to prison. This sounds like something reasonable to advocate for: Counting prisoners as living in, for example, Evansville correctional facility in Evansville, Illinois instead of the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago where they lived before incarceration could lead to skewed Congressional representation and federal funding.

Indeed, the dicennial census is prone to overcount whites and undercount minorities as Morrello notes in this fairly breathtaking point: “In 2000, about 1.3 million people were overcounted, mostly because of duplicate counts of whites with multiple homes. In contrast, about 4.5 million people, mostly black and Hispanic, were not counted.”

Wow — at least in this case the rich really do count more as people. Does this mean that John McCain was counted 4-7 times?

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