Census 2010 will be the 23rd official count of the people living in the United States of America.

Next month, everyone with a street address is scheduled to receive a basic questionnaire from the U.S. Census Bureau. For those without a street address, the Census Bureau plans to designate areas for hand delivery of questionnaires by census personnel. In remote areas, they anticipate the possibility of counting residents in person rather than delivering questionnaires.

This is only an opening salvo, asking who lives where, while the actual census will not be taken until next year, following the decennial pattern specified by our founding fathers. Though it may not have been part of their plan, substantial amounts of money are now tied to the answers.

Past censuses have shown that about 40 million households will fail to return a completed form. To count those people, the bureau will be hiring more than 800,000 people to conduct a door-to-door headcount of those people who fail to return their form. The concept is to find everyone, even the homeless.

In addition, the bureau, for the first time in history, will be using a nationwide advertising campaign to announce the census and persuade people to participate. The bureau will utilize radio, TV, print and outdoor advertising in 18 different languages to raise awareness and drive participation.

A major controversy has arisen over who will lead the census. President Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of commerce, Judd Gregg, was expected to assume the role as part of his position. However, complaints from some quarters about possible manipulation of the census have brought about a change of course. The director of the census will report directly to the White House, rather than to commerce.

The importance of responding to the census inquiries cannot be overstressed. Many decisions on distribution of the funding that is about to be generated from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan (formerly known as the stimulus package) will be based on U.S. Census data, as analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Unemployment benefits and educational assistance programs, for example, will be based on census information.

On a continuing basis, census figures are used in calculating Medicaid, foster care, rehabilitation services, social services grants, substance abuse prevention and treatment grants, adoption assistance, child care and development block grants, and vocational education grants, as well as allocations of billions of dollars in government funding for schools, roads, hospitals and other vital programs.

Another major use made of census data is the drawing of political districts. Last fall, Proposition 98 was passed by California's voters, putting the power of drawing new district lines in the hands of an independent commission, rather than in the hands of the politicians who can benefit from district configurations. The census will still provide the pertinent data upon which the commission will base its decisions.

In 1912, after the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had grown from its original 105 to a nearly unwieldy 435, Congress voted to freeze the number at that level. This remains the number of members of the House today and, simultaneously, makes the distribution of power in the House highly census-dependent.

Since the number of representatives is fixed, shifts in population from state to state bring changes to the distribution based on percentage of the total population of the U.S. In 2000, New York and Pennsylvania each lost two representatives, despite population growth. Their percentages had dropped, while distinct growth occurred in Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Texas, bringing two additional seats to each of those four states. This is called reapportionment.

With Electoral College seats determined by the same method, the importance of an accurate census to both presidential elections and federal legislation cannot be denied.

Jurisdictions with prison populations have been known to pose a knotty problem for censuses. Prisoners are counted in their place of incarceration, rather than where they would be if free. Some think that this artificially inflates the amount of money allocated. This policy, which may be changed in the future, could affect Amador County, which already saw its population drop last year. The numbers could drop further if those incarcerated at Ione's Mule Creek State Prison are removed from consideration.