Every person counts

We heard the other day that the census is taking saliva samples off the envelopes people send in to create a secret government database.

It's a joke, it's not true and maybe not even technically feasible, but it's the sort of thing that rattles around out in cyberspace without possibility of denial or explanation and makes it that much harder for the government to do its constitutional duty every 10 years.

Because counting the number of people living in a place is one of the basic tenets of our republican form of government.

If we were a democracy, it wouldn't matter how many people there are, because everyone would vote and that would be that. But to be a representative form of government knowing how many people there are is critical to providing them with the appropriate representation.

But because we move around so much, counting Americans has become harder and harder to do. There are few people today who couldn't point to a friend or relative who lives in a couple of different places.

Headlines in the last 10 years talked about Douglas County as a second-home Mecca, or a hot spot for retirees. Both these things make the county's population exceedingly difficult to track.

The 2000 census required the state to correct its population figures by around 1,400 people. The latest census could result in a correction approaching 5,000 people, or 10 percent.

The laws that apply to our county, the benefits we receive and the representation we have all depend on how many we are. That number will be determined by how we respond to the census.