During the past few months, we’ve been conducting major field quality assurance operations. The last two I’ve blogged about in the past – the vacant/delete check and the field verification check. Both of these are last chances to include cases that may have been incorrectly or incompletely measured.

All our data collection is now done. I am pleased to report that we remain on schedule as we have gathered a complete picture of the nation.

Our follow up is important to ensuring an accurate census, and I want to thank the American public again for their patience. At this point, we have attempted to record the population characteristics of every household, and sought a resolution on every address.

We are now entering the data processing phase. All of the questionnaires we received, either directly from respondents or from in-person follow up, must be converted into an electronic format, processed, and then tabulated, in order to provide the state population totals necessary for apportionment.

As mandated by law, the national and state population counts must be delivered to the President of the United States by December 31, 2010. This will be the first release of any data from the 2010 Census. We have much to do to get ready for this.

Please submit any questions pertaining to this post to ask.census.gov