The founding fathers must have chuckled at the impossibility of the job when they etched it into the Constitution: Count every man, woman and child along every back road and big-city avenue in the entire country. From Key West to Nome, today's Americans will largely get the founders' joke yet again as the U.S. Census embarks on its once-a-decade count this year - they're accustomed to approximations of how many people plod their shared corner of the world.
Why does it really matter, after all, that a Nebraska town comprised of a tavern, a few crumbling houses, four street lamps, and one drivable, dirt street be counted exactly right? Or even at all?
"Because I live in it," said Elsie Eiler, who is Monowi's entire population. Yet Census estimates from this summer say that there are two Monowians.
"Where's this other person?" Eiler said. "Let me know. ... I don't want to come back to my house at 11 or 12 and see someone else there."
Others across the country who live in the tiniest of tiny towns, from Indiana river country to the wind-swept Wyoming plains, feel the same way as Eiler about Census counts and estimates. Proudly holding onto their identities, with the line between existence and disappearance of their villages so narrow, they insist every person counts.
So they want them counted right.
The Census estimates that there are four incorporated towns with just one person. 
But when contacted, residents in three of those places say they aren't the lonely souls the Census says they are. The population of the fourth - Hoot Owl, Okla. - could not be verified.
"Who's that one?" said Thomas Saucier of Goss, Miss., one of the supposed one-person towns. "There's 50 right here in Goss!"
Told that some estimates of the country's most microscopic towns haven't gone over too smoothly, an official of the federal count got a bit chapped herself.
"We're doing the whole country," said Barbara Vandervate of the Census Bureau. "If we could do one state a month, it'd be much easier to count everybody."
And another thing: "If people don't answer the questions, guess what? They don't get counted."
A resident of one of the supposedly one-person towns - New Amsterdam, Ind., listed that way in the 2000 Census and in last summer's bureau estimate - concedes that people there may have something to do with the statistical snafu. Mary Faye Shaffer cut the Census little slack, and said the town is bent on getting an accurate count this time around.
In the general store that she owns - the only business in town, unless you count "a bait shop that's there if they want to be there" - Shaffer tallies residents of New Amsterdam until she reaches 19.
She proudly mentions the couple who moved to town after retiring from Wal-Mart, and she brags about the beauty of the area, mentioning how she can see the scenic Ohio River from her backdoor.
But bring up the Census, and her melodic Southern accent hits some sharp notes.
"It's embarrassing - 'You live in a town with one person?'" Shaffer says people say to her.
"People call here just because they think there's only one person. You wouldn't think the government would screw up this bad."
Shaffer surmises that the count went wrong in 2000 because the town doesn't have a post office. That means residents have listed nearby towns that have post offices as their addresses.
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