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the dictionary definitions of “enumeration”) but turned up the volume a little bit. He insisted that the founding fathers were “well familiar with methods of estimation,” so had explicitly rejected the sophisticated techniques used by the Census Bureau. (Which, as those techniques were developed in the twentieth century, would be quite a feat.) And Thomas repeated the canard that “actual counting” is fundamentally different from “estimation” even though counting is an estimate. Once again, the justices marshaled proofiness to justify using bad numbers instead of good ones—and to try to ensure that certain people are robbed of representation by virtue of a purposefully inaccurate census.

As this book goes to press, the Census Bureau is beginning its 2010 census. The Supreme Court’s two rulings leave census law in a complete shambles; there’s a sense that some statistical techniques are kosher while others are illegal, and there’s no real basis for telling which are which. Republican legislators are already challenging the validity of the new census. They threatened to sue long before the first census form went out in the mail, and a few have gone beyond mere threats. In October 2009, Louisiana senator David Vitter—probably best known for his use of a high-end D.C. escort agency—tried to force the Census Bureau to rewrite its census forms to ask respondents to declare whether or not they were U.S. citizens. If his measure had passed, not only would it have cost enormous amounts of money (425 million forms would have had to be thrown out) and delayed the start of the census, but it would also certainly have scared noncitizens, particularly illegal immigrants, from participating in the census.77 It was a shameless play to try to make the undercount even worse. Predictably, it was defeated by a strict party-line vote, with the Democrats opposing and the Republicans backing it.

However, open season will really begin once the results of the new census are in. It’s almost certain that the new decade will bring a fresh cluster of lawsuits about census methods, and, given the conservative makeup of the Supreme Court, it’s quite possible that the first census of the twenty-first century will be forced to divest itself of all mathematical techniques that were developed after the eighteenth.

Proofiness has undermined the very foundations of our democracy—the mechanisms that we use to count our citizens and ensure that they are justly represented in the Republic. Gerrymandering for political gain is deemed acceptable, even though it clearly dilutes the votes of some of our citizens. Statistical sampling is deemed unacceptable, even though rejecting it forces the government to use numbers that it knows are inaccurate. No matter how many intellectual backflips legislators and judges go through to justify their positions, the fact remains: bad mathematics is being used to deny our citizens—mostly our minorities—their rightful vote. In a democracy, there can be no graver sin.

7

Alternate Realities

I believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, but a lot of readers have an objective truth that differs from mine.

—Cynthia Tucker, letters editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Governments can’t change reality. But it’s not for lack of trying.

Politicians will challenge—and try to alter—any fact that they dislike, no matter how incontrovertible it might be. At one point, Indiana even tried to change the value of pi.

Yes, that’s the pi you learned about in math class—the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Apparently, Indiana state senator Taylor I. Record, egged on by an eccentric doctor, decided that pi’s value (approximately equal to 3.14159) was inconvenient. It made calculations difficult. Therefore, it had to be changed. On January 18, 1897, House Bill number 246 was born—if passed by the House and the Senate, and signed by the governor, it would officially change the value of pi to 3.2. The old value, “wholly wanting and misleading,” would be discarded for the greater glory of mankind.