Arithmetic geometers write about statistics

Jordan Ellenberg, in yesterday's Washington Post: The census will be wrong. We could fix it.

This continues a proud tradition of mathematicians whose area of expertise is nowhere near statistics writing newspaper pieces saying that statistical sampling in censuses a good idea; Brian Conrad, 1998, New York Times.

In some sense it carries more weight when mathematicians who don't spend most of their time battling randomness in some sort or another . Statisticians of course think that doing statistical adjustments to the census in order to make it more accurate is a Good Idea; it gets them, their students, or their friends jobs!

As a combinatorialist I admire the theoretical elegance of our country's once-a-decade exercise in large-scale, brute-force combinatorics. But in practice, well, of course it needs some statistical help.

And here's something interesting:

Since 1970, a mail-in survey has provided the majority of census data, so what we enumerate is not people but numbers written on a form, which are as likely to be fictional as any statistical estimate.

I wonder if people are actually lying on their census forms. I suspect this would skew the count upwards. People who deliberately lie on their census forms, at least the sort of people I know, are likely to give "joke" answers. And large numbers are funnier. I live in a one-bedroom apartment, and if I were the sort of person who lied on government forms I would easily say that ten people live in my apartment. I can't give a comically low number of people living here, because the census insists that a positive integer number of people live in each place. Does the census has some sort of way to correct for this?