The U.S. Supreme Court case Utah v. Evans, 2001, revolved around the method used by the Census Bureau to count individuals in the national census. The state of Utah challenged a statistical technique known as "hot-deck imputation," which was used to estimate population numbers for households where data was incomplete or missing. This method resulted in North Carolina gaining an additional seat in Congress at Utah's expense due to higher estimated populations from this technique. The court ruled 5-4 against Utah, upholding that hot-deck imputation did not violate federal census statutes nor the Constitution’s requirement for an “actual Enumeration” of persons every ten years for apportioning seats among states in House of Representatives.

In the dissenting opinion for Utah v. Evans, Justice Scalia argued that the use of statistical sampling in census data was not permissible under federal law. He contended that the Census Act required a tabulation of population and did not allow for estimates or approximations to be used as substitutes for actual enumeration. Furthermore, he asserted that even if such methods were allowed by Congress, they would still violate Article I Section 2 Clause 3 of the Constitution which mandates an "actual Enumeration" every ten years. Thus, according to him, using statistical sampling techniques violated both statutory and constitutional requirements.