int increase in the mail response rate we save about $85 million.
We do have challenges, what we call coverage challenges. Not everybody wants to be counted. We have to go to special lengths to try and catch those people. We have something starting next Monday, actually. We have – on Monday night, we have shelter evaluation. We’ll go to shelters and try and enumerate the people without a home at those shelters. On Tuesday night next week we’ll go to soup kitchens and mobile food vans and try and get those people. And then Wednesday night next week we’ll actually – between midnight and 6:00 a.m., go to places where the homeless might congregate and try and get them counted as well. So we do go to long – to substantial lengths to try and count everybody.
After we deliver the apportionment counts to the President by the end of December, we then have another statutory deadline. We have to report the population by block to all the states by the end of March, so they can begin their redistricting operations. The numbers at the end of December determine how many seats they’ll have in the House of Representatives. Well, there will be some states that gain seats, some states that lose seats. And even the states that don’t get a change, the people move around, so the districts are going to be of different size. So they all have to redistrict. All the states have to redistrict to get districts of the same size. I guess the exception are states that are so small they only get one seat. They don’t have to redistrict. It’s the whole state anyway.
Then we will proceed to release the remaining data products starting roughly next June through the end of September of 2013. These are basic tabulations that people are interested in.
I mentioned the 1.4 million temporary employees. We will recruit approximately 3.6 million people to fill those 1.4 million jobs. And we are – last I checked we were ahead of our target. We were about 109 percent of our target as we move up by – our target is this 3.6, two five million applicants by April 25th
. And we were – as of, you know, last week, we were at 109 percent of our target for that week. So we – that seems to be going well.
Now we’ve basically – the basic components of the census are – they really fall in four groups. One is to get the – what we call the frame right, and that’s to get the address list right. And we have a number of operations to do that, including the address canvassing I mentioned earlier, but other ones.
We then do a whole series of enumeration operations, some that focus on the housing units, but also some that focus on the group quarters. We have a special group quarters enumeration program, where people will go out to these nursing homes and the college dorms, as so forth, and collect that information.
And then we have support operations for that. For example, we have a telephone questionnaire assistance centers. We have four of those that – commercial call centers that – there’s a number on the form. If you have a question, you can call them and they will answer the question. So we have to have all those kind of support operations.
Obviously, there was a huge printing task to print out what we mailed out. We printed – and the enumerator forms, also, you know, 200 million forms in paper that had to be printed, plus all of the advance letters and the reminder cards and the training manuals and all that. It’s a huge printing activity. We had this – all of these 120 million mail out forms in this one warehouse in Chicago. You know, it’s putting all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket very carefully. And starting about a week before the forms were to go out in the mail, the U.S. Postal Service would start backing trucks up. We had, like, a thousand semis of mail forms going out from that Chicago warehouse all over the country. So it’s a lot of support, obviously, not just the people in the field.
And then we have, if you will, verification and – what we call verification in coverage operations. If there seems to be a discrepancy on the form, and I’ll give – we will