I know that this headline is riveting and that perhaps only one, incredibly wonky political friend of mine will read beyond that title (if that is you, please like this link as proof you are a nerd).

The census is serious stuff.  It happens once a decade and it drives the assignment of Congressional seats and political boundaries.  State results are out and as today’s Politico headline announced, “2010 census results show power shifting westward”.

As of April 2010, the official date of the census, the five fastest growing states were all in the West: Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Texas and Utah.  As many political commentators have pointed out, this would seem to benefit Republicans as these states gain Congressional seats.

With my new post-partisan hat on however, this is not going to be argument about Republicans v. Democrats.  This is going to be an argument that the data driving the census is quite likely entirely wrong already and we’re not even a year into the decade governed by this dataset.

As of April 2010, these “fastest growing states” were also, in parallel ranked amongst the top states for home foreclosures (in order of misery - #1: Nevada, #4: Arizona, #5: Idaho, and #8: Utah).  Recent data suggests Texas has now cracked the top 10 as well.

While it is noble that people packing up their belongings and filling a moving truck took an extra 10 minutes to fill out the census, this act of civic responsibility has likely totally skewed the data that will drive assignment of political seats.  It wasn’t enough that we had to bring down our economy with the mortgage fiasco, we had to screw up the census too!