Found as duplicate on US 1840 census

[lyllye]

I have found a great-great grandfather on the 1840 census twice.  Exact number of males/females with exact ages.  Someone had suggested that it possibly had something to do with padding the numbers for the electoral vote.  Has anyone else heard of anything else of this nature or seen any proof of such? 

I am currently doing some heavy research on that census because I have some church records that I want to compare to determine who moved from South Carolina about the same time as my family did.

[barryd]

When I was doing my Brigham Young University Genealogy  Course some years ago I studied New Mexico. I came across a person who was on a census twice in the same year, the first enumeration back east and the second one later in the year in New Mexico. Remember that the US had no specific date back then as Census Day, Just the year was specific. So he was on twice which gave me the indication of when he arrived in New Mexico.

Your ancestor was on twice. Where was the first place and where was the second place?

[lyllye]

Spartanburg, South Carolina on both.  At first I thought there were two Ashford Pettit but a distant cousin who had been researching longer than I pointed out the similarities.  I can't remember who suggested this being the cause and I would think that if that were true there would be more than one duplicate family for that area.  So I am tending to think this untrue and that possibly they were in the middle of a move to another nearby area and just got counted twice.

[Erato]

I have found people duplicated on US censuses but not in 1840.  There was no reason for me to think that the duplications involved any padding of the numbers for political purposes.  The earlier censuses were not conducted on the same specific day everywhere in the country so people could move from one place to another and wind up being enumerated twice.

It would take a massive statewide fraud to inflate the population enough to increase the number of representatives in the US Congress.  Local fraud of some kind is much more likely.  One of my ancestors was involved in such a case.  He was a plaintiff in a law suit which alleged fraud by a local enumerator in the 1905 Iowa state census, the goal apparently being to facilitate a change in the liquor laws of the county.  You might be able to spot this sort of census inflation at the local level by examining other names in the county to see if they were also duplicated.