By John Byczkowski
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The Census Bureau estimates it missed counting 62,878 Ohioans and 48,875 Kentuckians in the latest national headcount, according to data released late Thursday.

Nationwide, the bureau reported it missed nearly 3.3 million Americans, or 1.16 percent of the nation's population. Generally, undercounts in Greater Cincinnati fell below the national average. The city of Cincinnati, however, had the largest adjustment of any major city in Ohio. The bureau said it missed 1.6 percent of Cincinnati's residents, or 5,296 people.

The so-called undercount is controversial, and it remains to be seen whether anyone will officially acknowledge the missing Americans.

"We're in some murky waters right now," said Ron Crouch, director of the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville.

Population counts from the census are used to distribute government funds and draw legislative districts. While federal courts have said congressional districts must be drawn according to actual census headcounts and not adjusted data, the rules at the state and local level are less clear.

If the adjusted counts are used for distributing federal government revenues, Ohio could be a net loser and Kentucky a net gainer. Ohio's undercount came to 0.55 percent, less than the national average, and Kentucky's was an above-average 1.21 percent. States with the biggest adjustments were California, Texas, New York and Florida.

The Census Bureau spent some $270 million to design and implement the adjustment, as a check on the quality of the basic headcount. In the 1990 census, the bureau spent more than $500 million to track down households that didn't respond to the census survey. With census costs rising and accuracy declining, the bureau designed the adjustment to save money and improve results.

The Census Bureau decided to release only the actual, unadjusted headcount, and withheld the adjustments. But a federal appeals court last month ordered the release of the adjusted data.

While all the census data released to date has been available on the Internet, the bureau released the adjusted data on CD-ROM late Thursday, during a snowstorm in Washington D.C., without analysis. A Census spokesman told USA Today that adjusted figures are "highly inaccurate."

The official Census Bureau headcounts don't catch everyone, and in particular tend to miss minorities, children and people with low incomes, so the bureau tries to estimate the undercount.

The headcount also misses transient populations. Two Kentucky counties with the biggest adjustments are the sites of military bases: Christian County, where Fort Campbell is located, had an adjustment of more than 2 percent, while Hardin County, site of Fort Knox, had an adjustment of 1.7 percent.

In Ohio, however, the main issue in the adjustments was race. Though blacks make up 11 percent of the state's population, more than half the people missed by the Census Bureau in 2000 were black.

In Hamilton County, the bureau reports it undercounted blacks by nearly 3 percent, or 5,648. Blacks made up 80 percent of those missed in the county.

The story was the same in Cincinnati. Seventy-eight percent of the 5,296 the bureau said it missed in the city are black. The city's black population was undercounted by 2.9 percent.

Those numbers may have an impact on a lawsuit claiming that Ohio's legislative redistricting discriminated against blacks in Franklin, Hamilton, Montgomery and Mahoning counties, in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act. A panel of three federal judges in Columbus heard arguments in October. A decision is expected soon.

Scott Borgemenke, a political consultant who helped draw the new district lines for state Republicans, said the adjusted population figures should have no impact on the lawsuit, because the districts were drawn using the best data available at the time.

The adjusted figures are unlikely to affect how much money the Tristate receives in transportation funds, said Mary Leubbers, a senior planner at the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments, a transportation planning agency.

She said OKI's main tool is a package of data, soon to be released by the Census Bureau, that will use the original, unadjusted population figures.

The debate will remain, however, over which figures are closest to the actual population. Mr. Crouch said he doesn't know the answer, but "I tend to err on the side of counting more people. We certainly know there's been an undercount of minorities, poor people and children."

E-mail jbyczkowski@enquirer.com