Thursday, April 22, 2010

Advocates recommend moving census online

By Mike Chalmers
The News Journal (Delaware) (April 19, 2010)

Want to pay the electric bill online? There's a website for that.

Buy a swimsuit? Get the news? Book a hotel? Stay in touch with friends? Pay your taxes? There are websites for those, too.

But fill out your census form online?

Forget it. Time for pencil, paper and snail mail, the same way it's been done since 1960 and not too different from the way George Washington was counted in the first census in 1790.

In an increasingly online world, a paper-based census seems like an inefficient, costly and wasteful anachronism that should have been replaced by now.

The website unofficialcensus.org, which asks the same 10 questions as the real census, was launched last month to push for an online form by showing how simple it could be.

More HERE.

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I noticed that the one thing the Unofficial Census doesn’t ask that the real Census does (besides phone number, which it doesn't need) is the relationship of the people on the form. This is a HUGE issue, especially when dealing with genealogy in 72 years, when the information will be made available.

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