It’s like a drivers license…
A drivers license is a state certification of your identity and the fact that you meet all the requirements to drive. You don’t get a license until every requirement is met. The same is true with a birth certificate; a certificate is not issued until every requirement for registration is met. The idea that the State of Hawaii issues birth certificates for births that do not fully meet their requirements for registration is like suggesting that they issue drivers licenses to people who haven’t passed the driving test. The suggestion that Barack Obama’s birth hasn’t been “accepted” is patently absurd.
Old Timers
Obama COLB (click for full-size)
I was at the birth certificate factory today and I went over to one of the old timers, and I said to him, “you remember about 15 years ago you were talking to me about sticking a birth certificate into one of those numbering machines?” He said, “sure I remember; that was New Jersey”.
He told me that the hospitals in New Jersey entered information into a computer system (this was something that ran on a PC under MS-DOS) and that computer system would dial-up the state computer system and transfer the record using a modem. The hard-copy paperwork went to the local registrar (if memory serves me right this is a county official) who checked them and sent them to the state. Once the state was finished they would stick the paper certificate into a slot in a desktop numbering machine, and then type the certificate number into the computer system with the electronic record.
All this time Deep Birther was there, and Grandma (I haven’t mentioned Grandma before). What ensued was a lively discussion about how every state is different in their process. Grandma told me that in South Dakota, even though they have an all electronic system, they still have the computer number certificates in electronic batches that may include births for multiple days. I ask what order the certificates were numbered in, and the reply was that it wasn’t in any particular order within the batch as best she recalled.
The old timer was probably remembering from the 1980. None of us go back to 1961 in the business. No one at the Hawaii Department of Health goes back to the 60’s either. So this leaves us to speculate as best we can.
What the State of Hawaii says…
We do have this from Hawaii DOH spokesperson, Janice Okubo:
In regards to the terms “date accepted” and “date filed” on a Hawaii birth certificate, the department has no records that define these terms. Historically, the terms “Date accepted by the State Registrar” and “Date filed by the State Registrar” referred to the date a record was received in a Department of Health office (on the island of O‘ahu or on the neighbor islands of Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i, Maui, Moloka‘i, or Lana‘i), and the date a file number was placed on a record (only done in the main office located on the island of O‘ahu) respectively.
Historically, most often the “date accepted” and the “date filed” is the same date as the majority of births occur on O‘ahu (the island with the largest population in our state). In the past, when births were recorded on paper they may have been accepted at a health office on an island other than O‘ahu, such as Kaua‘i. The paper record would then need to be sent to O‘ahu to have a file number placed on it, and the filed date would then be sometime later (as you know, the state of Hawai‘i is comprised of multiple islands with miles of water in between). The electronic age has changed this process significantly, and it was determined some time ago that one date would suffice.
Okubo leaves out one vital fact in her narrative. There is no“Date filed by the State Registrar” on an original Hawaiian birth certificate from the 1960’s. Check out the Alan certificate from 1963. Whatever date was abstracted from Barack Obama’s original birth certificate and printed on the COLB, it was NOT the date filed; there is no date filed. Okubo says, and we may reasonably assume based on the published Obama birth certificate, that the Date Accepted by the Local Registrar and the Date Accepted by the Registrar General were the same and were August 8, 1961. That’s the date that Obama’s certificate entered the work flow at the Department of Health.
We know from Okubo that numbering the certificate came at the end of the process. We don’t know whether the process in between took minutes, hours, days or weeks. There’s no reason to assume that the numbers were assigned precisely in the same order that the certificates were accepted (due to batching, stacking and the division of work between staff).
What we do know is that the records were accepted first, and filed last, and we know that the date filed does not appear on the birth certificate from 1961.
Dr. C –
You may have answered this before, if so I apologize for the repeat question.
Why do some of the short form BCs issued today say “date accepted” and others say “date filed” (like the Presidents)? I understand what the difference in terms is, but why wouldn’t the database that they are extracting the data from, be consistent? Is the “date filed” field blank on some BC records, so they default to the “date accepted” field?
When the Nordykes requested their BCs in 1966, how would that work? I assume that they filled out a form with names, DOB and sex (I assume they would not know the cert #s). Then the DOH clerk would go to the Master Index for August, 1961, look up the names and find out what the cert numbers were, then go to the central file room and pull the BCs.
In 1961, would the Master Index be an actual book with columns and rows in which the information including the cert #s were entered by hand?
“In regards to the terms “date accepted” and “date filed” on a Hawaii birth certificate, the department has no records that define these terms.” -Okubo
Okubo is either lying or the DOH is run by incompetent personnel.
The current form was adopted in 2001. Somebody had to tell the printer and the programmer what information to put on the COLB and under what conditions. I have trouble believing the form design was not documented, and that their is nothing that documents the report parameters given to the programmer.
Okubo also seems to be confused when it comes to the order of proccessing. If she would have used the full terms, it would have been obvious to her. A form is always going to be filed with the local registrar before it is going to be accpeted by the State Registrar.
As far as the term “Reg. General” that appears only the early years of statehood, that is best explained as a holdover from the territorial government. Their could not be a Stte Registrar until Hawaii became a state. The existing territorial position did not become a state position until the postion was created by the Legislature. (becoming a state includes growing pains.)
http://books.google.com/books?id=Mgs4AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=Hawaii+%22Registrar+General%22&source=bl&ots=sWaX0kyAjo&sig=LhVifRbakyLLjdi0zz7aIUwvdvo&hl=en&ei=Za0qTIHOBIrGnAfzrJWlAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Hawaii%20%22Registrar%20General%22&f=false
For some reason my “there” became “their”. I guess somebody needs to take “possession” of this mess.
Janice Okubo said that the designation “date filed” or “date accepted” was not an important one. From that, we may reasonably conclude that it is not stored in the database at all; it is a constant value on every certificate printed during a particular era. On the 1991 “Peter Boy” certificate (issued 2 months before Hawaii switched to the COLB) we see that the certificate says “Date Received by Local Registrar”, and that is most certainly a constant value, and probably is the most historically accurate statement of what is in the database date field (it makes sense that if they are only going to display one date, it’s the earliest one). I don’t have a lot of samples with issuance dates on them to prove this.
September 5, 1991 – “Peter Boy” – “Date received by local registrar”
Unknown – Jeremy Smith – “Date accepted by State Registrar”
Sept 9, 2002 – Patricia Decosta – “Date accepted by State Registrar”
June 6, 2007 – Obama – “Date filed by registrar”
Unknown – Unknown – “Date filed by registrar”
“Okubo is either lying or the DOH is run by incompetent personnel”…or you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
You jumped to the conclusion that the label on the date changes under “conditions” and then call the State liars or incompetents (both extremely unlikely if you think about it) for not documenting something that in all probability exists only in your head.
Just noticed that you provided the readers a link to the Wikipedia entry for “modem”. LOL
What is the “Peter Boy” COLB? Can you provide a link?
Lying or incompetent and you have trouble believing? There’s a load of nothing.
I do not know if such a book existed and if so how it was maintained. My knowledge of manual systems is extremely limited.
What might have been the case would be that at the top of the page was a blank for a 3-digit number to be hand written in, and the pages pre-numbered in rows 0-99. The child’s name and date of birth could be written on the appropriate line. The advantage to such a system is that it highlights missing numbers.
What this country needs is a good birth certificate museum.
“You jumped to the conclusion that the label on the date changes under ‘conditions’.”
The DeCosta COLB was issued on SEP -9 2002. It has “Date Accepted by State Registrar”. Obama’s was issued on Jun -6 2007. It has “Date Filed by Registrar”. They are both on a form designed in 2001. Unless someone can show me that the form changed (which nothing indicates a revision), it is only logical to conclude that the change took place in the report software or the parameters (if/then statements).
Dr. C – “The advantage to such a system is that it highlights missing numbers.”
Does it also mean that the local registrar could call the clerk and get numbers in advance?
Let’s say that you are the person at the hospital who typed up the BCs, then went around to the new mothers to get signatures. You find out the doctor left to go to another island for several weeks, so you call the registrar clerk and she pre-assigns some cert #s.
I guess it would depend on how much importance they put on the cert #s being in a reasonable order. If they were too out of sequence it would make it harder to track down the information later on.
if you all remember, this is a favorite birther talking point that was constantly brought up by the missing James (James the Lucas partner). Birtherdom suffers without out it, so please don’t condemn it too much. (or birther brains will pop)
Dr. Conspiracy claimed that the DoH changed the COLB form without changing the revision number. Good luck getting a straight answer about it from Okubo.
To Bill and others
The COLB/BC information comes from a database
When printed out, in an automated system, it pulls the unique records of filled data to create an extracted matrix of data in fields
These fields populate a pre-created form which has a set of non database extracted elements
These pre-created elements create a skeleton blank form suitable for printing including such items as the page formatting and spacing and non entered text
Non entered text, ie non unique printable page information would be “Date of Birth”, “Hour of Birth”, “Date Filed” etc
These are NOT extracted from the unique record of the childs birth and are wholly irrelevant, just make the BC more human readable.
These text elements, if changed, make NO change to the database unique records.
Why don’t you just use the databases own header descriptions or “labels” I hear you ask….
‘Cause the “labels”, depending on who created the database schema and when, may be a set of numbers, an arbitrary alpha-numeric string, “Database_element_date_recorded” etc etc
The form may be updated and changed but this in no way effects the underlying unique records of birth
I can’t disagree.
After the first 10,000 phone calls and mis-heard numbers creating duplicates, that would get old.
In some systems the local registrar attaches a “local file number” to the record, but that is distinct from the “certificate number” or the “state file number”.
You fail to take into account the essential fact that I point out in the article. There IS no “date filed” on the 1961 form and therefore there CANNOT be any indicator that could be used for the purpose you imagine.
If I were to follow the birthers logic, I will probably have to conclude my COLB is fake even though it is a supposed “long form.” Though it is a certified copy from the 1970s (from late 1960s birth), my copy was provided from the local county though it is stamped that it is a true copy of what is on file at the state and recorded in the county. The points that would probably “fail” with the birthers:
1. It has a local file number but the Birth Number only includes the first 3 pre-printed numbers. I assume the rest was added at the state and I would see it on a state copy (or their current COLB which has far less info).
2. It does not mention my parent’s race, only birthplace and current residence of the mother.
3. It was not filed or accepted. The registrar signature (actually a stamp) with date uses the term “date received by local registrar.” The state may have a Filed or Accepted date but I do not, nor have never needed, a state copy. Mine was always sufficient. Even if they did have another date, there is no place for it on this “long form.”
4. The fields for the parents say “state of birth” but the person filling out the form listed city and state. Would this void the form?
http://networkedblogs.com/5k01T
CBS/Vanity Fair: Only 39% believe Barack Obama AKA Barry Soetoro was born in Hawaii…
Compared to 6% for Kenya, by the way.
The poll has a high percentage of “don’t know” responses or obviously wrong answers like “Kansas” and “Indonesia”.
If you throw out all the responses except Hawaii and Kenya, the results then become 13% Kenya, 87% Hawaii. That’s consistent with other polls.
This is not surprising given the estimated $50 million already spent in the publicity campaign to make people think Obama was not US born. (That estimate was prepared with the same criteria used to estimate the money Obama is spending keeping his records secret.)
So, if we spread the $50 million figure at various places around the internet, it will become a fact and we can file court papers using it as evidence. 🙂
that site James links to is total garbage (normal for James, that’s his hangout, him and Lucas)
in other news conservapedia says Obamas birth name was Barry Soetoro and later in the article they also say he was born in africa.
.
Actual quotes for this great web pedia site
First,, this brilliant publication states:
“Barack Hussein Obama II (birth name Barry Soetoro), allegedly born in Honolulu August 4, 1961”
.
Then they announce:
“Barack Hussein Obama II claims to have been born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham in 1961, but there is evidence that he may have actually been born in Kenya. In 1967”
strange, they have no idea how silly that is. (Soetoro born in Africa to an Indonesian?)
1967 wow, conservapedia the source for brilliant birthers and righties, how great it is!
Rich, I had wondered what happened to ORYR, who was posting here a couple of weeks ago trying to claim that he did not moderate his comments. I guess is back to reposting the same nonsense from WND, the Post and Fail, and the other birther sites. It figures that James, or Jim would be linking to that site. I wonder when he will start trying to defend convicted felon Lucas Smith again.
They don’t seem to realize that if Barack Obama was born in 1967, he graduated from Columbia at the age of 16, not 23, and matriculated at Occidental when he was 12 or thereabouts. Do they have any idea how stupid they are?
I think you misunderstood my comment. I did not say that the date was not stored, rather I said that “designation ‘date filed’ or ‘date accepted'” was not stored. That is, I am saying that there is no column in the database called “TYPE_OF_DATE” which has values such as “Date Accepted by Local Registrar” in it.
The computer generated certificates prior to November of 2001 appear to have pre-printed labels and those fter appear to have no pre-printed labels.
Yes, that’s plan, at least that’s what I heard at the last meeting. Personally I think we should start with a smaller number and then just let it “grow with the telling” like the Obama defense cost numbers.
When figuring out the money, we have to add Apuzzo’s pro bono time (since they add that for Obama), and Kerchner’s full-page newspaper ads, and the WND “Where’s the birth certificate” billboards. Then we need to fantasize numbers for all the space WorldNetDaily gives the issue for free (gotta be HUGE) and then all money they’re paying Polarik/Polland and TechDude, and all the hundreds (oh, yeah, it’s thousands) of anti-Obama clone web sites.
OK, now riddle me this,
If a similar poll were conducted about George W Bush, what percentage would give the correct answer?
Can YOU tell me, James, what state George W Bush was born in without cheating?
PS: Everybody who guessed Texas is wrong.
I just heard that over $100 million has been spent on propaganda to mislead people into thinking that the president was born outside the US. I know that this is true because I said it myself…
I have no idea where Barry Soetoro was born.
Barrack Obama however was born in Hawaii.
Wasn’t Shrub born in Connecticut?
ellid says “Do they have any idea how stupid they are?”
.
if you read more conservapedia articles you would find that they have no idea how ridiculous their site is.
We know from lil’ Barry Soetoro’s school record he was born in Honolulu, HI and he was an Indonesian National while enrolled as a second grader.
We don’t know which hospital Barack Hussein Obama II was birthed at or which doctor attested to his birth so the Hawaii DoH registrar would “accept” the data presented as a factual account of the birth event.
Oh, Sven. You’re so ridiculous.
would “accept” the data presented
.
the old filed vs accepted argument, that’s James (mabe sven is James)
Yes. Although, I read on the internet there is evidence to suggest he was born in Saudi Arabia, to a Saudi oil prince who had an affair with his mother.
It seems Arabs have a thing for white gentile women. That’s what I read on some website, so it must be true.
I think so and wasn’t his mom the Quaker Oats guy?
Here’s dad with his own private stimulus package:
http://www.tmz.com/2009/06/09/george-h-w-bush-bikini-lapdance/2/
“C’mere Little George, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. I want you to meet your step-mom.”
There’s a sold out Fenway Park of people filling that head.
I thought Don Draper smoked himself into an early grave, stylish Hardie Ames suits and all.
No one really knows where Bush was born- how could we since we haven’t seen his BC?
“We know from lil’ Barry Soetoro’s school record he was born in Honolulu, HI and he was an Indonesian National while enrolled as a second grader.”
Again- how can we trust a school record? Whoever this Barry Soetoro is, we obviously cannot rely upon a school record as verification of his birth. We would have to see his birth certificate.
No one knows for sure if Palin was born in the States, rather than Canada. She admitted to as much. We’ve never seen her BC.
She admitted that her family defrauded the Canadian government by taking her brother across the border to Yellowknife for free medical care despite him not being a Canadian citizen Nothing would surprise me about her.
Prove it.
And don’t forget the salaries of all the shills Murdoch used to set the train in motion. Beck, O’Reilly, et al may have tried to distance themselves from the fray, but they are the ones that gave it legs in the first place. .
Which is why GOP candidates are not saying anything. They feel the BC rumors will help them.
OK, well there wouldn’t be a ‘TYPE_OF_DATE’ field in any case. There would be three (maybe more?) different date fields in the ‘original’ computer system. At some point the ‘original’ system was replaced and they realized they only needed one date (because ‘accepting’ and ‘filing’ was the same thing when it was done via an on-line terminal based application). When the data conversion took place, I expect the question was asked which date to use from the old system. Since ‘received’ is the date when the DOH is officially responsible for the data, that would be the one picked, and that would be the label used on the output documents. From that point on, there is no difference in the system between ‘received’, ‘accepted’, and ‘filed’ from a either a bureaucratic or database point of view. Over time the use word changed due to the fashion of the day, nothing more.
Makes sense. That is about the time-frame when a Government department could be reasonably expected to have mundane access to a laser page printer and be able to control their own printing requirements for the on demand documents and security paper. They probably had them a while before that actually, but had to use up the preprinted stock.
I just want to emphasize that there was no “Date Filed” on a 1961 birth certificate, and whenever such certificates were eventually keyed into a computer system, no data field accurately labeled “Date Filed” could have been included in that database since there would have been no source for it.
I seriously doubt that there would have been any type of computerized database for the records back in 1961. It is very likely they simply relied on a combination of ledger book and an alphabetized index card system. I know that seems like a really hokey way to handle things…. but computers were very large, expensive, complicated pieces of equipment in those days. It wasn’t the type of device where you could use a keyboard to enter data. The big innovation in the 60’s was microfilm — which allowed paper records to be stored in a more compact way.
I don’t know about Hawaii, but in my state, public offices were way behind the curve on computer use. Well past the time that just about every law office was relying on computers and printers to prepare legal documents, you would see typewriters on the desks of personnel in public offices. Keep in mind that early computers did not have hard drives — they relied on magnetic tape and later huge floppy drives, and the storage capacity of a typical floppy was far less than the amount of data you can store these days on your cell phone. That would not have been a particularly useful way of storing and tracking large amount of data, especially given issues over the reliability of the storage media.
So bottom line, there wasn’t a “database”. There was only paper and microfilm.
Regardless of the “date filed” non-existence, you still have to explain the scenario where Obama’s certificate was held in the DoH office for at least three days before being stamped with the registration number. His certificate was stamped shortly after Nordyke certificates and we know that their certificates were accepted on August 11.
Obama’s certificate shows date August 8, 1961.
Backlog, batching, vacation…
A process taking 3 days does not imply that it was “held.” Today, if you write to the Hawaii DOH for a birth certificate, they say it takes 3 weeks. Is this because the request is being “held?”
NC – you keep asking the same questions, or variations on the same question, over and over again. What are you looking for? Someone to say that “yes, you’re right, the President isn’t eligible”? You do realize that that means we now have President Biden, who is even MORE liberal than Obama, don’t you?
The definition of insanity.
NC1 thinks if there is any question that he/she can ask, which cannot be answered to his/her satisfaction regarding President Obama’s eligiblity, then President Obama is clearly ineligible and the Military should immediately refuse all orders and somehow President Obama would be whisked out of office.
It says so right on NC1’s personal Constitution.
It took DoH at least three days to put a certification number on Obama’s certificate, compared to two days shorter time in Nordyke’s case.
Obama’s certificate was part of the batch that was reported to the newspapers several days prior to Nordyke certificates batch.
The case for unattended birth registration is as strong as any of your alternative explanations.
The case for unattended birth registration is as strong as any of your alternative explanations.
Too bad for there’s no evidence of an unregistered birth. Your speculation is not evidence.
“The case for unattended birth registration”
Is still immaterial. There is no evidence of an unattended birth, and even if there was, that by itself would not make the President ineligible. Once again you have a line of speculation on top of speculation.
“one possible explanation of the numbers would be an unattended birth. Its possible the President’s birth was unattended. And if it was unattended, then it is possible that someone committted fraud. And if someone committed fraud, it is possible that the President wasn’t born in Hawaii. And if he wasn’t born in Hawaii, its possible he was born outside the United States. And if he wasn’t born in the United States its possible he is not a Native Born Citizen. And if he isn’t a Native Born Citizen then we will have succeeded in finding an excuse why he can’t possibly be our President. Because we knew all along that there is no way he could possibly be our President.
All thats necessary is stack about a dozen possible speculations on top of each other to get to where you want it to be.
Humans have opposable thumbs.
Lemurs have opposable thumbs.
Therefore, you are a lemur.
We don’t really know at what point the newspaper notices went out in the process. I see no reason to invent an unattended birth when President Obama himself says he was born at Kapiolani.
Complete and utter nonsense. You’re wasting your time as you are notorious for doing.
The doifference between date filed and date accepted came up when Hawaii went totally wired to their central servers. No more Date filed. only Date Accepted
What you should have learned from the main article, had you been paying attention, is that there never was a Date Filed on an original Hawaii birth certificate in 1961.
And you have no point. More meaningless, pedantic birther noise.
That’s all their blather ever is.
Well, “paper and microfilm” is a database.
The 1961 system would not have been on computer, quite correct. But in the early 1970’s they would have started computerizing the administrative, bureaucratic parts of the system, but not the records themselves. Without knowing anything about their system, I can guess that to ensure nothing fell into a hole, they probably needed to know the status of every document and where it was in the workflow. When was it received from the hospital, has it been scanned for obvious errors? Has it been microfilmed? Has it been archived? This info points to whose desk it is on and ensures the physical document doesn’t get lost.
They would not have recorded the details of the certificate itself, disk storage was too expensive, though they might have used tapes if they chose to do so. I doubt it myself, as that implies a rather expensive data entry and verification system and microfiche was orders of magnitude cheaper. It wasn’t until the mid 80’s that hard disk costs came down sufficiently to routinely store “massive” (but tiny by today’s standards) data.
I just want to point out that data items like ‘date received’, ‘date filed’, ‘date accepted’, have only bureaucratic meaning, they are used to track the physical document through the office work-flow in order to answer the question “Who’s desk is it currently on?”. Nothing more, nothing less. Internal work-flow events are irrelevant to the fundamental task of archiving the statistics relevant to the birth event.
At the end of the day, there are only two dates that matter: the date the birth took place and the date the state took legal responsibility for archiving that fact,
The date the state took legal responsibility for archiving the birth record reveals when the the bureaucratic process began and any other work-flow status report is completely irrelevant to the history of the document once that work-flow is complete for the document.
It doesn’t matter if you call the “the date the state took legal responsibility for archiving the birth event” the ‘Date Received’, the ‘Date Accepted’, the ‘Date Filed’. the ‘Date Registered’, the ‘Date Transmitted’, the ‘Date Reported’, the ‘Date Lodged’, or any other combinations of words, they all mean the same thing: “the date the state took legal responsibility for archiving the birth event”