Hawaii maintains birth records in at least a couple of ways. The first is what used to happen back when a child was born in an Hawaiian hospital in the early sixties. The doctor and hospital staff fill out a form that looks a lot like this.
(http://incogman.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/major-developments-in-obama-citizenship-case/)Note that the owner of this copy blacked out some of his own personal information - a wise practice in the age of identity theft. More on this later...
Of course, in the sixties it was difficult to quickly create a duplicate that could be provided as proof of identity from a paper original document. Enter microfilm. Take a picture of the original paper document and all the others in the collection. Store these images in fingernail sized portions of a larger piece of film. Copies of these films could be kept in any public records office and very quickly could be printed to photo paper to create a copy for the owner of the record. This looked much like this
(http://mobiusinformer.com/2008/10/16/wheres-the-beef-obama/)
Any official birth form, from any copy method will have an embossed seal (official seal) and usually a signature of the person who certified the copy. I'm not familiar with the practices to be able to say whether this is always on the front or on the back in the case of Hawaii, or perhaps it is allowed on either side. You can see the embossing and the signature on the next picture.
Note that these two examples are 'Long Form' certificates, because, as we shall see, progress has brought us a newer faster, 'safer' version of the birth form. This is known as the database report form. As a fellow traveler in the information age, you know that information in a records drawer or in a box of photographs isn't as useful as something in a database. At some point Hawaii bit the bullet, paid an outside contractor, or lots of happy union employees to type all the info from their paper/photo birth certificate records into a computer database somewhere. Those happy computer technicians also configured a form that allowed a single birth record to be printed onto a fancy piece of state birth record stationary to create a paper copy of an original birth document. In later years it is quite possible that the printer not only prints the birth info, but also the fancy background, header and footer for the form.
Here is a typical example:
(http://incogman.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/major-developments-in-obama-citizenship-case/)
Note that this form contains a LOT less information than the original form provided by the hospital to the state records office. No hospital name, parental employment info, doctors signature, etc. This is to help prevent identity theft. In the age of anonymous baby adoptions, it is also to protect the rights of the natural parents of a child that was put up for adoption. My understanding is that you can only get back the info on your form, that you have already provided on your request form. That information is displayed on the official print out.
So if the system is working correctly, then a hypothetical citizen of Hawaii walks up to the records clerk, fills out a request, plunks down a few dollars, and gets a short copy of their birth information from the database, but only the information that matches the information on the request form.
So, Chairman O has indirectly made available a scanned/photographed image of a short form Hawaiian Certificate of Live Birth - see below.
Is that it? Is this case closed? Well, no it is not closed. Here are a few questions that are still unanswered?
- Is the Obama certificate authentic? It is not valid, as 'ANY ALTERATIONS INVALIDATE THIS CERTIFCATE' and it is clearly redacted by removing the certificate number, just as the long form certificate at the top of the page. Neither is a valid certificate for purposes of a court of law. Both have been further altered by scanning into a computer. Only an official copy from the records clerk can be used for legal purposes.
- Has the document been doctored using PhotoShop or another photo editing program? Maybe, there are reasonable arguments made by both sides. Only a valid copy could prove this one way or the other.
- Does the info on the form provided match that of the original piece of paper filed with the State of Hawaii. The Hawaiian official who commented on Chairman O's certificate stated only that they had an original certificate in their office, but she did not confirm or refute that the data matched that on the scanned internet version. The word ing was very jilted and legalese.
- Would you or I just go down to the records office with someone from the opposing camp and request a copy right then and there and be done with it? Yes, but Chairman O has spent many many (some say hundreds of thousands) of dollars to prevent its release. This is insane unless he is hiding something.
- Oh, yes. Number five. I forgot to mention that in the past, you didn't actually have to be BORN in HAWAII to get put in their database and get one of this pretty certificates. It was common practice for children born outside the US of A, to a US citizen parent, to have their birth registered by their parent or stateside grandparent back in Hawaii, within a year of their birth. So it is possible for the State of Hawaii to have an original record for B.H. Obama even if he was not born in the state.
- The State of Hawaii has a special program for people of indigenous Hawaiian ancestry. Because of the problem with the basic Certificate of Live Birth not necessarily proving that a person was born in the state, the state agency that awards these benefits requires copies of the original long form birth certificate for persons requesting benefits. This confirms that the state still has the capacity to copy the original birth document or at least the microfilm version. Therefore, any claim that the short form certificate is the 'only available form that you can get' is clearly false.
- Oh, yeah! As we will see in a future post, the certificate that is claimed to be B.H. Obama's Certificate of Live Birth, cannot prove he is a Natural Born Citizen. It is only possible for it to prove he is not. Birth on the soil of the United States of America is only a portion of the requirement to be naturally born.
