The United States is required by constitutional fiat to undergo a head count every 10 years. The next one begins in April.

The census is incredibly important to just about every man, woman and child in America, because the final results are used to allocate congressional seats, electoral votes and federal funding.

With those kinds of stakes on the table, you'd think Americans would be climbing all over each other to be counted. That is, however, not the case.

Every 10 years, when the U.S. Census Bureau sends its counters out into local communities, there are segments of the population that do not wish to be disturbed. Among these hard-to-count populations are the homeless, roamers who seem to stay on the move pretty much all the time, illegal immigrants, and folks who just plain don't trust anything the government does or wants to do.

It's hard to argue with those points of view, but the sociopolitical aspects of a census are not really the concern of the Census Bureau's army of counters. Their job is to count.

And that's what they will attempt to do, on or about April 1 of next year, at which point most U.S. households will have received a 10-question survey in the mail.

If the recipients of those questionnaires don't respond within a certain amount of time, the Bureau mails out a second survey sheet. If there still is no response, census workers are sent in search of answers.

They are relentless, especially at the local level, because so much is riding on getting an accurate count. For example, if a region has an especially large uncounted population, that region will not get the representation it deserves in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Without that representation, the region won't get its share of the funding pie and other government programs. You see how refusing to be counted can haunt you - you won't get as much of your tax dollar returned to your community as the folks in a neighboring community who did get counted.

The head count has a substantial history in this country. The first census was taken in 1790, shortly after the conclusion of the American Revolution. The Census Bureau spends the 10 years between counts figuring out what the numbers mean, dribbling out various demographics and statistical models. It's fascinating stuff.

The census is not without controversy. Many people, for example, debate the merits of counting illegal immigrants, arguing that since they shouldn't be here in the first place, their numbers should not be used to determine representation in Congress.

That seems, on its face, a reasonable perspective - until you take into consideration that they're here, legal or not, and they are part of the population's structure. They use services and infrastructure, and therefore need to be counted in the process that ultimately provides funding for those benefits.

The bottom line here is the every-decade head count is critically important to just about everyone in the United States. And it's pretty much in everyone's best interest to be counted. That concept is especially crucial to local governments, which depend on funding for needed social programs, services and infrastructure.

This is our way of saying that you shouldn't just blow off the census questionnaire when it shows up in the mail. It only takes a few minutes to fill out, but the information you supply will be used to make important decisions for the following 10 years.

And if census takers come calling, keep in mind that it's not the IRS. Give them the information they need, perhaps steering them to places where you've seen homeless folks.

It's not a government conspiracy. It's a head count.