By AP
DETROIT –
Census workers in Michigan have entered the next phase of the 2010 count after more swiftly than expected wrapping up the door-to-door effort to find people who didn't return their 10-question form.
Michigan had the country's fifth-best mail participation rate, with 77% sending back the forms. That still left hundreds of thousands of residences for census enumerators to visit, mostly in Detroit.
Those visits wrapped up last month and the focus now is on telephone contacts or in-person stops to clarify earlier census answers, as well as a check to ensure vacant homes and apartments in fact were empty.
This phase continues into August. The high-stakes count has federal funding and Michigan's political influence on the line.