Same-sex marriage is now legal in Washington, D.C., and 17 states (and Arkansas will join them, if a lower-court judge’s ruling last week is upheld). Now the federal government’s task is to produce an accurate count of same-sex married couples.
This posting discusses the challenges for the Census Bureau in counting same-sex couples, married and unmarried. The accuracy of data depends on responses in Census Bureau questionnaires and bureau procedures to collect and edit responses, and the posting describes both.