Washington (DC) - Stumbling over its multi billion-dollar plans for a high-tech census, the government says it will go back to counting the nation's 300 million people the old-fashioned way - with paper and pencil. Help wanted: 600,000 temporary workers to do the job.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told Congress Thursday his department will scrap plans to use hand held computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don't return the census forms that come in the mail.

That's one of a number of changes that will add as much as $3 billion to the constitutionally mandated 2010 count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14 billion.

More here at Associated Press...