EDITORIAL PLAYING THE NUMBERS USING STATISTICS TO DENY THE VALLEY A FAIR SHARE.

BY hook or by crook, the vested interests in Los Angeles City Hall will do whatever they can to keep the San Fernando Valley from getting fair representation on the City Council.

Their latest ruse is simple enough: Fudge the numbers.

For years, Valley residents have lived with overtaxation and underrepresentation. Only four out of 15 City Council districts are based wholly in the Valley, and there should be five, if not six.

Census 2000 and the subsequent redistricting were supposed to take care of all that. As the City Council Redistricting Commission began the process of reapportionment, the consensus was that at last the Valley would get its fair share.

But now the commission finds itself under pressure from activists wanting it to form districts not on the basis of the Census Bureau's numbers, but on rough approximations of so-called undercounts - phantom L.A. residents who either failed to show up or get counted in the census.

The idea behind ``counting'' the undercount is that a good number of L.A. residents, especially African-Americans, Latinos and homeless were missed in the 2000 enumeration. So the bean counters, using whatever formula they derive, would estimate how many are missing.

Then they would divvy up the phantom residents among the city's various communities, depending on local demographics. The neighborhoods with more documented renters and minorities would be credited with more undercounts than the rest of the city, and council apportionment would be made accordingly.

The result is that the newly recalculated city population would be skewed more heavily to communities based outside the Valley, and the Valley would likely lose its fifth council member - on the basis of some statistician's speculation.

There is, to be sure, little doubt that the census doesn't count everyone, and that's a shame. Because of the undercount, federal funding - which is based on census numbers - shortchanges areas close to the Mexican border and large cities. For Los Angeles, that's a double-whammy.

That's why we have argued in the past that Washington should use some degree of statistical sampling to make sure that federal funds are distributed equitably to reflect the burdens placed on L.A. and other communities because of the federal government's failure to control the borders.

But there's quite a difference between an impartial federal bureaucracy extrapolating an educated approximation from its own research, and local officials with obvious political motives fudging the numbers in whatever way they see fit.

The potential for error and abuse is great, especially as the bean counters try to determine not just how many people weren't counted, but also where they ``live'' down to the street.

No wonder the country's founders specified that political apportionment should be based on the ``actual enumeration'' of the population - not a rough guess.

Don't be fooled.

The movement to figure undercounts isn't about empowering the underrepresented. It's a power grab that would inevitably come at the Valley's expense.