Histroy

The U.S. government conducts a population census every 10 years, adds up the counts by geographic location, and uses the resulting numbers in formulas to allocate seats in the House of Representative and Electoral College, and to make public funding and tax decisions. It has served as an essential tool of representative democracy since 1790. The raw data from the census also serve as a decennial snapshot of the nation, a very long list, organized by household, ideally of all people resident on census day, with additional information on the name, age, race, sex, geographic location, and other characteristics for each individual.