Germany Census 2011: Not controversial anymore

[Tender Branson]

Stern poll:

78% will participate in the May Population Census
17% will resist efforts to be interviewed
  5% are undecided

Participation by Party:

86% CDU/CSU
83% Greens
82% SPD
72% FDP
68% Left

http://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/stern-umfrage-volkszaehlung-laesst-deutsche-kalt-1674063.html

All Germans will be counted by a register-based census on that day.

About 8 Million Germans (10%) will be interviewed by 80.000 Census interviewers on May 9 to get information that cannot be counted by a register-based Census, like religion etc.

http://www.zensus2011.de/english.html

[Tender Branson]

Can somebody explain to me how a Census taker can interview 100 people on a single day ?

If you work 10 hours, you have 6 minutes to interview each person and that's without driving to each house ...

[Tender Branson]

Can somebody explain to me how a Census taker can interview 100 people on a single day ?

If you work 10 hours, you have 6 minutes to interview each person and that's without driving to each house ...

Maybe they're counting every member of a household, even though they'd only need to actually interview one of them?

Ah yeah, didn't think about that.

But with an average household size of 2-3 people it's still 30-50 households that a census taker has to visit on a single day ...

[Tender Branson]

I also thought about the fact that illegal people and U-boats will and cannot be counted at all in this register-based census.

While the former is a fairly large number in the millions, the latter I think is very small.

I don't think there are many German citizens who are considered U-boats, because who nowadays is not registered anywhere (town register, work register, house register, social security register, etc ?).

[Tender Branson]

I don't think there are many German citizens who are considered U-boats, because who nowadays is not registered anywhere (town register, work register, house register, social security register, etc ?).

That was how they caught the RAF members, right? By identifying the "U-boats" (great term, BTW)?

Yeah, it's called the "Rasterfahndung". In the 70s, all registers in Frankfurt for example were matched to each other because the RAF members used fake ID's to get appartements in the city. The police then screened out the people who only paid their rents with cash and not by bank account. Only about 15.000 people were left and then they filtered out the people who were not found in other registeres such as the work register, house register, social security register, etc. After this, only 2 people were left: 1 RAF terrorist, who was immediately arrested and 1 drug dealer.

[Tender Branson]

With 2 weeks to go, I´m already very interested in the results, especially in Eastern Germany - where no real Census was held for almost 30 years.

I guess there will be many Karteileichen in the eastern states and therefore these places might be even more de-populated than previously thought. I think many persons there are still in the local registers, but moved to Western Germany over the past 30 years or elsewhere, without de-registering in their original towns.

I think there's even a possibility that Germany ends up with less than 80 Million people ...