The Daily News Tribune reports that the state “could stand to gain anywhere between $2.5 million and $5 million in federal funding” as a result of a coordinated effort to challenge Census Bureau estimates of city and town populations. Sixteen cities and towns successfully argued that residents were undercounted, and the Census Bureau agreed by adding 21,295 people to its 2007 estimates. (Boston’s number was revised from 599,351 to 608,352. The most recent change was to Nantucket’s total, up from 10,531 to 11,060.) 

But anti-sprawl academic Wendell Cox writes at NewGeography.com that the Census Bureau seems to grant upward adjustments to complaining cities as a matter of course:

St. Louis has successfully challenged the Bureau of the Census estimate of its population five of the seven years from 2001 to 2007 (the most recent estimate). The total of additions from census challenges adds up to 43,000 people. This is a not insubstantial 12.4 percent relative to the approximately 348,000 2000 Census count for the city.

Cox finds it odd that the Census Bureau publishes a list of successful challenges to its numbers (notice how well Massachusetts is represented on here, though it’s certainly not the only state with immigrants and college students), but there seems to be no list of cases where the agency stuck to its original figures.

 …there is the more fundamental question – have there been any rejections?

It is possible that everything is on the “up and up” with respect to the Bureau of the Census challenge program. On the other hand, there appears to be plenty of potential for mischief, as some jurisdictions have become experts at challenging and the Bureau may find rejections difficult, given the pressure that could be received from members of Congress.

Will we see more and more challenges as other cities and states catch on? We could be seeing the demographic equivalent of grade inflation.