 have explained to us, but (inaudible) concern. What was the earliest Congressional election to be conducted based on this 2010 census?MR. WEINBERG:
That would be the – QUESTION:
That would be the 2012 election.QUESTION:
And my related question is whether the results of the census will affect the (inaudible) election in the future?MR. WEINBERG:
Definitely it would affect Presidential election in the future, also the 2012 election. The Electoral College, which is the number of votes that determine the President is based on a state level. So if – for example, let’s use California. California, I think, voted for President Obama rather than Senator McCain in the last election. If they got two more seats, they would get two more votes in the electoral college. So there’s a direct relationship between the number of representatives and the vote in the electoral college. So it would definitely affect the voting in 2012 as well. Sure.QUESTION:
Can you give us any sense about how the U.S. census compares to censuses done over – in other countries around the world?MR. WEINBERG:
That’s an unfair question. Of course, ours is the best. What do you want me to say? (Laughter.) No, I will – that’s a facetious remark, but we do have a lot of interchange with other countries. And there are similarities. There are differences. Specifics, Canada does a census – the Canadian census is every five years. They’ll be doing their next one in 2011. And they have had, for many years, an initiative to get broadband connections out as much as they can in the country. So they are focusing very heavily on the internet in 2011 to collect their data. And we – matter of fact, I mentioned how important that was to us. We’ll be going to work with them to learn from the Canadians about the internet.
In many countries, they use a long form only and not a short form. So they’ll – I think England and Wales, for example, they’ll use 100 percent long form. Not every country has a regular collection. They differ. I mean, you can’t – let’s take a country – unfortunate example of Haiti. They don’t have the wireless – they don’t have the internet connections at all. They don’t have mail right now. The mail system has broken down. You want to do a census in Haiti right now, you’d have to go door to door. So there are many differences. We try to assist other countries. We have – countries come here to observe us. Most of them are amazed by the amount of money we spend on advertising and try to learn from our experiences there. So in some ways we’re a leader, in some ways we may be lagging behind. I’ve given you, sort of – we’re a leader in the advertising, the partnership, the outreach efforts. We’re sort of lagging behind on the internet use. QUESTION:
Nickolay Zimin. (Inaudible) what is the total budget of the current census?MR. WEINBERG:
The 10-year – no, but we don’t think of it as a single year – I can give you those figures, but over the 10-year period of – well, it’s more than a 10-year period. I guess a 12-year period of 2001 through 2013, it’s 14 and a half billion dollars is what we estimate for all the parts of the census, including the American Communities Survey I mentioned. That’s about 1.8, $2 billion of that. We spent about a half a billion dollars on aligning all of our roads with a GPS system so that they’re now in the right place. That was about half a billion. And then the rest, about $12.3 billion over that 10-year cycle – sorry, 13-year cycle is 12.3 billion for the short form census itself.QUESTION:
But you cannot (inaudible) the particular – the budget for April 1st
Oh, for this year alone, for 2010, we’ll be spending about 7 and a half billion dollars just this year on the census. So this is clearly – we spent about 85 percent of the total in just 9 and 10. That’s – it’s hiring people. It’s nice because we’re in a recession. We can give people, a lot of people, jobs, even if they’re just temporary jobs. But it’s really hiring one and a half – almost one and a half million people. That costs money. We also pay them for training. While they’re bei