The idea for this story came from someone else in an email, and they are welcome to take credit for it.
Mike Zullo gave an affidavit that was filled on May 14, 2013, in the appeal of the case of McInnish v. Chapman to the Alabama Supreme Court. The affidavit is embedded in my article, “Zullo’s irrelevant affidavit.” Zullo claims at the offset: “The information contained in the affidavit is based on my personal knowledge and if called as a witness, I could testify completely thereto.” In fact, much of the affidavit is information from third parties rather than from his personal knowledge, but some of the things in the affidavit do relate to his personal knowledge, and that is what this article explores.
The topic is birth certificate numbering in Hawaii. We only have a handful of birth certificates from Hawaii from 1961, but the ones we do have are consistent with a numbering scheme involving alphabetizing the last names of the children’s surnames in monthly batches. Zullo’s affidavit says otherwise:
The serial number shown on the image of the [Obama] certificate, which purports on its face to have been imposed on the form with an automated sequential numbering stamp, is 61-10641. Investigators learned at that time, batches of birth certificates were collected monthly, ordered by date and time of birth, and then sequentially number-stamped in a special room by a single clerk trained for the purpose, to minimize numbering errors.
and
The long-form original certificates were inspected twice for accuracy by two different clerks and then signed by the registrar. They were kept together secured in a certain room until they were all numbered at the end of the month. They were not allowed to become out of order and they were not numbered incorrectly. (It should be noted that the Nordyke twins were born minutes apart and their respective certificate numbering was based not only by date but by time as well. This indicates the clerk scrutinized the documents prior to placing them in chronological order for proper numbering.)
Zullo in the preceding citation states that he is aware of the Nordyke birth certificates, their certificate numbers and the date of their birth. In fact, he gives details showing that information was in his mind:
Vital statistics will show that Susan Nordyke was born at Kapiolani Hospital at 2:12 p.m. Hawaii time on Aug. 5, 1961, and was given No. 151-61-10637.
There is another Hawaiian birth certificate that we know of, and it is that of Johanna Ah’nee. Her date of birth is August 23, 1961, and her certificate number 151-61-09945. 
She was born after Susan Nordyke, but her certificate number is smaller. If Zullo’s certificate numbering scheme were true, this would be impossible—in his scheme the later birth should have a larger number. The Ah’nee birth certificate proves that Mike Zullo’s statement about certificate numbering in Hawaii is false, but not every false statement is a lie. Did Mike Zullo know it was false? Yes, he did.
Mike Zullo had never talked in public about the Ah’Nee certificate before the December 15, 2016, press conference, and it is highly problematic for him for multiple reasons.1 I know now that Zullo was familiar with the Ah’nee certificate before his Alabama affidavit. I know this from the testimony of former Cold Case Posse member Brian Reilly who wrote to me:
In 2012, as a Cold Case Posse member, I viewed a prepared overlay of Johanna Ah ‘Nee’s birth certificate on Barack Obama’s PDF depiction of his birth certificate. It was my understanding that Jerry Corsi had provided the Ah ‘Nee birth certificate to Zullo.
In his press conference on December 15, Mike Zullo talks about that very overlay. The year before Zullo’s affidavit, he had in his possession a birth certificate that proved what he said in the affidavit was false. Of his own knowledge, he knew it was false. Zullo lied in a court-submitted affidavit. One alternate theory is that Mike Zullo knew about the Ah’nee certificate, but did not believe it was authentic. Birther Doug Vogt espoused the theory that all published 1961 birth certificates from Hawaii were forgeries, except those of the Nordyke twins. That theory allowed him to explain why Obama’s certificate was no different from the rest. In any case, Zullo told the basic lie that investigators had found that certificates were numbered in the way Zullo claimed. All the evidence available to Zullo pointed the other way, so Zullo could not have had personal knowledge of something that was patently untrue. Either way, he lied.
1The Ah’nee certificate also proves (again) that Zullo’s race code table presented in his 2nd press conference was fabricated false evidence. The race of Ah’nee’s father was “Hawn-Caucasian-Chinese,” and the penciled code is “3.” That’s the code for “Indian” on Zullo’s bogus code table.
john:
“The forensics involved is very very complex. Zullo tries to break it down in simpler terms but it is difficult. I seriously doubt anyone on this board could probably grasp of the forensics behind Zullo’s investigation.”
Yes, lies can also be very complex. The more lies that one tells, the more difficult it is to remember all of the lies and eventually one will slip up and be exposed by their own deception. Only a very few on this board will not be able to grasp this concept.
Yeah, sure whatever.
Let’s see what Trump has to say about it. He’s no fan of obama, but I’m sure he will give Kevin Davidson all the attention he deserves.
I was thinking of writing a letter to Joe Arpaio, or the County Attorney about Zullo’s crime.
Zullo also lied on the Hagmann show about how “paid Obama operatives” were the ones pushing the Xerox theory that destroyed most of his fake evidence from the first two press conferences. Two my knowledge there were only a handful people who ran tests and participated in the discussion on the Xerox WorkCentre compression algorithms. Those included NBC, gsgs, and Kevin Vicklund who began examining the construction of the PDF file and comparing it with Xerox patents. NBC ran the first tests. I ran tests after reading their work and duplicated the results. (justlw in a comment here had suggested as early as 2011 that an office machine like a Xerox WokCentre might cause the anomalies that the Birthers were seeing in the PDF file.)
To my knowledge none of these people work for the Obama administration in any way. I certainly do not. gsgs is German. I know enough about Kevin Vicklund’s work to know he does not. Others like Doc and John Woodman who have discredited the work of the Cold Case Posse are well known to work in the private sector.
Zullo falsely identified me as someone who works on projects funded by DARPA. We all know how he made that stupid blunder by wrongly identifying me as Richard Skalsky, the owner of a domain called Fogbow.com (not thefogbow.com owned by Foggy). Richard Skalsky had worked in the field of artificial intelligence.
So this is just one more example of Mike Zullo omitting relevant facts, twisting the truth and outright lying.
Be sure to consider the new sheriff-elect as well.
You should consider giving Doc, Reality Check and others on this board more attention. You might learn something.
Did he use the race codes in his affidavit too
Let’s just pretend, arguendo, that this was not a lie, but a genuine belief of Zullo’s.
On what planet is there anything unsavory about paying people to tell what Zullo now concedes was the truth?
It becomes difficult, on occasion, to parse what is a deliberate Zullo lie from the more fundamental fact that he is simply incompetent as an investigator. There can be little doubt as to why his “careers” in law enforcement and private investigation were both strangled in their cribs.
He is not smart enough to be an serious investigator of any sort.
No, he did not. This one was publicly blown before the Alabama affidavit. I debunked it on July 18, the day after his press conference. A pseudonymous poster, William Rawle, on YouTube was the one who actually discovered that Zullo was using codes for the wrong year. I had the real federal codes in my own files from a previous FOIA submitted to help me decipher the codes. Of course we later learned that Hawaii used its own unique set of codes.
I don’t doubt that Mike Zullo has made false statements that he believed to be true, but I cannot reconcile what Zullo has said over the years with what an honest person would say.
Zullo told Hagmann that the Ah’Nee document has been in the CCP possession since late 2011. @16:20 Mark
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xyQmqHcjhew
At about the 45:40 mark he reads directly from the Reed Hayes report about the “x”s. And at about 50:30 he again reads the Hayes report about the Dunham signature. Clearly Hayes is only looking at the PDF.
I get the impression that there may be two Reed Hayes reports.
Or Zullo is being deceptive and trying to leave the impression that the Hayes report supports the latest nonsense about the Ah’Nee certificate.
Of course; there’s no indication that any birther has ever seen a paper copy of the long form (or short form, for that matter).
I agree: Zullo said the majority of the final press conferences’ “findings” were “discovered” in the last seven weeks. So Zullo’s (alleged) Hayes quotes are of recent vintage. Yet Zullo, Gallups, etc., have been touting another Hayes report for years. So unless they were lying about the first report’s existence, there’s more than one report.
I realize they haven’t examined the paper copy but I was thinking that he hasn’t even looked at the AP copy of the handout. His conclusions about the 6d and 7e check box “x”s falls apart with the AP image.
That maybe why Zullo went strangely out of his way at the 15th press conference to try to discredit the AP copy.
If there isn’t a recent new Hayes report, it means Zullo has been sitting on this smoking gun stuff since 2013
That’s what Hayes says.
“My observations, findings, comments and/or opinions regarding the birth certificate are based solely on the PDF file Mr. Zullo provided for my examination and analysis. I was informed the COLB I reviewed is the exact document released by the White House, and I performed my examination under the assumption that it is.”
So he didn’t even get whatever he examined straight from the White House website.
http://www.reedwrite.com/index.php/2016/08/03/obama-birth-certificate/
So they didn’t have an Obama birth certificate, and they didn’t have an Ah’nee birth certificate that could possibly have been in the possession of any alleged forger– other than maybe THEMSELVES– and Hayes didn’t even look at the pdf on the White House website.
I’d be shocked– shocked, I say!– if Reed Hayes would ever have anything to do with Zullo after how he done him. He done him wroooooong.
I have little doubt of this. The findings of the “last seven weeks” clearly involve a new engagement of Hayes, pulling him into an area of the “analysis” that he is even less qualified to comment regarding than the first.
The first report (based on Zullo hints across the years) was centered only on the signatures. This is all new.
^^^ This.
The fact that those two check boxes cannot possibly be copies of a single original is even far more clear on the AP image than the White House pdf.
Oh… certainly. And I am in strong agreement that you have identified an example of a knowing lie on his part in an affidavit offered to a court of law under penalty of perjury.
My point is simply that his core deficit is as much an intellectual one as a moral one. He is just not very smart. He lacks the capacity to critically judge information as true or false. He is easily led by people who are smarter or more aggressive than he is. He is incapable of assembling even the false facts he believes into a coherent theory of anything. Not a theory of forgery. Not a theory of history for any of these documents or images.
He is a perfect storm willful ignorance and low ability.
Birther reporter Lester Kingsolving of Worldnetdaily.com was at the White House Press gaggle when President Obama releaseed his copies of the long form. Kingsolving received the same hard copies in his press packet as the rest of the White House Press Corps.
Except for that one ability: the ability to lie glibly and convincingly.
Same is true for the signature of Dr. Dunham. In Hayes report, he says portion of the signature are pixelated. That’s true in the PDF but not in the AP copy.
Arpaio would be useless. The County Attorney might at least find it interesting, but it’s doubtful anybody’s going to go after these grifters.
I may have to retract this story, as there is a significant flaw in it. At the time of the Alabama affidavit, Zullo believed that Johanna’s birth certificate was a forgery.
‘for what earthly purpose would an agency want the birth certificate order by name with any numbering system, on a monthly basis
I am assuming that the books are in order and ranked by number, and the index ranked by name.
You search by name, get book by number. and search by number.
It does not seem reasonable to me that you would search by index number and then go to a book and search for document by name.
But perhaps they were ahead of time, as I think that amazon goes by number and search by number, and stores randomly.
Maybe the headline needed a question mark.
If he thought it was a forgery why make an overlay of it in 2012?
“The topic is birth certificate numbering in Hawaii. We only have a handful of birth certificates from Hawaii from 1961, but the ones we do have are consistent with a numbering scheme involving alphabetizing the last names of the children’s surnames in monthly batches. Zullo’s affidavit says otherwise:”
But, the problem with that, which you might not have foreseen, is that birth certificates would not be available for a month or so after the birth,
Do you not agree?
and , of course, as a last minute edit, it would confirm that the newspaper information was fake as the department would not issue notices of birth until the birth certificates are accepted , filed , and that means numbered
LOL
Hmmmm… I have no recollection of that. I thought that was a Vogt original.
Penzone might be a better recipient. You could include all the times Zullo tried to intimidate people with his connection to the Sheriff’s office. It was a whole lot like impersonating a peace officer.
another random thought. People must have believed the idea that the LFBC was a fake, because they took so much effort to prove that it couldn’t be a fake, well the only one who could prove it was not a fake, was the issuer of the LFBC, but, then again, it might be the issuer who is behind the attempt to disprove the fake. but now we know, in reality, it was the russians.
If he thought it was a forgery in 2012, why discuss its overlay in 2016? In the 2016 presser, was Zullo really saying that a forged document was used to create another forged document?
Saying that Zullo lied is like saying the sun came up this morning. What needs to be investigated are the CCP finances and how much money Zullo made off the investigation.
Yes, how many dollars were contributed over the years and how many dollars were spent? An audit by the new sheriff will reveal the answers.
^^^^ This.
^^^^ And this.
It’s my belief that literal fraud was perpetrated and committed by Arpaio’s office, including Zullo. This should be investigated and dealt with by the incoming sheriff.
bob over at fogbow…
“Volin recommends that constituents arrange for face-to-face meetings with their congressmen or available staffers, as they did between 2013 and 2015 to present his earlier “Sheriff’s Kit.”
“People can start getting ready,” Volin said. “We’re going to hold them accountable.”
It’s history repeating itself. But shouldn’t the kit be called “X-Sheriff’s Kit”?
Who went to a lot of effort to prove the LFBC couldn’t be a fake? I have gone to a lot of effort to show that various birther arguments are flawed, not that the LFBC couldn’t be fake. All you have to do is construct a conspiracy large enough, and almost anything is possible.
Yes, that’s correct. The same argument works against Zullo’s contention that they were numbered in strict, never varying birth order.
Nevertheless, in order to timely issue a birth certificate, you have to give it a number somehow, and you can’t wait until a year has passed (the deadline for a certificate of live birth).
The easiest way to number is to simply apply the number when you register the certificate. That doesn’t work in an old manual system because someone applying to get a copy of a birth certificate is not going to know when it was registered. You can’t expect a clerk just to start flipping pages.
In the Senate, there are only 7 new Senators, and 5 of them are Democrats. In the House there are 52 freshmen, of which 25 are Democrats.
By that measure birthers must have believed the LFBC was real because they took so much effort to prove it was fake. The problem being birthers always failed and the LFBC was always real.
Correct: Birthers were (and still are) very invested in the idea that President Obama’s long form is fake. Of course, no birther has seen President Obama’s long (or short) form. Yet they nonetheless have very strong opinions on the subject.
Incorrect: No one even attempted to prove that the long form couldn’t be a fake; rather, some have shown the insufficiency of birthers’ evidence of it being a fake.
Logic and reasoning are clearly not your strong suits.
The Hawaii Department of Health has already repeatedly verified President Obama’s birth there, and it has more important tasks than attempting to satisfy the unsatisfiable.
* * *
Birther confirmation bias is always amusing: Zullo all but said that the HDOH forged the digital image of President Obama’s long form birth certificate. But birthers without question accept the provenance of Ah’Nee’s and Booth’s long form birth certificates, which were also issued by the HDOH.
Not all. Doug Vogt believes that the Ah’nee and Booth certificates and others are forgeries. Those birthers that follow Vogt believe that the only authentic birth certificates known from August 1961 are the nordyke twins.
Not according to Ron Polland.
http://www.obamareleaseyourrecords.com/2011/09/nordyke-long-form-birth-certificates.html
And he’s #1 on the WND list!
Really I thought he also said those were fake too? I’ve seen many birthers claim documents are fake as soon as they disprove their theory about obama’s
That would mean that all known examples of August 1961 birth certificates are suspected to be fakes. What a perfect strategy. If they’re all fake, then Obama’s has got to be fake. Why doesn’t this surprise me?
Which is not much different then now.
From the Michigan vital statics website:
And Georgia
You might want to consider checking how something works before making a claim.
This article has been updated to include an alternate theory where Zullo could have believed that the Ah’nee certificate was a forgery.
Says who? What evidence do you have that a birth certificate had to be numbered before a notice of birth could be issued?
We have no idea on which date the birth certificates were numbered. One of your many problems is that you just make stuff up.
Accrding to Eleanor Nordyke who was giving birth at Kapi’olani the same time as Ann Dunham: “I entered the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital on early Friday afternoon, August 4, 1961. I was registered and my expected twins were given Hawaii State birth certificate numbers 10637 and 10638. My labor was slow with poor contractions from a distended uterus.
“Apparently, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama came in shortly after I arrived, because her baby was registered as number 10641. Her labor was strong, and she delivered Barack Hussein Obama early that evening. The next morning my contractions strengthened. The twins finally emerged at 2:05 and 2:12 p.m. Saturday, August 5th. By the way, I don’t want to do that again!”
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/feature/entry/for-birthers-honolulu-mom-an-inconvenient-truth
So the Nordyke twins were born on August 4 and their certificate numbers are 10637 and 10638.
Johanna Ah’Nee was born on August 23 and her certificate number is 09945.
The last time I checked, 09945 is a lower number than 10637 and 10638.
Trader Jack claims that Ah’Nee’s birth certificate should have a higher number because she was born 19 days after the Nordykes and Obama. But it’s not higher, which disproves his theory that the birth certificates must have been numbered in order of date of birth.
On the other hand, Ah’Nee having a lower number is perfectly consistent with birth certificates being numbered alphabetically at the end of a month. A comes before N, and N comes before O.
Just becasue the Birth certificates would not be “available” does not mean that the State had not received the birth info from the hospitals. The clerk could simply have taken the records they had received from the hospitals that day, type them into the document they sent to the newspapers, then send the records to the filing department. Easy peasy.
Not so. You just wouldn’t be able to look them up by the index number.
Clearly, if you really really needed to reference a document for a birth that occurred, say, 20 days ago, you could just look in the pile of BC certificates that had been received since the last numbering batch. They would almost certainly be in alphabetical order in the folder.
You know, pre-computer offices actually had some quite clever systems to help them do things effectively and efficiently. Today there are companies that specialize in systems for government bureaucracies systems. Specialty software that does stuff like manage birth certificates (Doc’s old business for example). Well it was the same back in the days before computers too.
Companies made specialty furniture, specialty stationary, specialty document storage, etc, etc, etc. Just because they didn’t have computers it doesn’t mean that the place was anarchy.
It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the office had a wall cabinet with 26 (or more likely 30 just for ‘extras’ and even rows) ‘bins’ labeled A to Z. As the birth documents were received all they had to do was toss them into the appropriate alphabetical bin and their job was mostly done when they got to the end of month processing – just a quick sort of the bins with multiple births and start numbering. They’d be done in an hour.
The ‘extras’ bin might have been temporary stacking for ‘unsorted’ items, or maybe there was one space for babies that passed shortly after birth, or overflow for crowded letter bins. Whatever. I’ve seen dozens of these sorting cabinets in many many office situations, even long after their original use had been taken over by computers. In the 80’s they were often re-purposed for sorting computer print jobs for pick up by the user that invoked them.
A monthly system alphabetical numbering either statewide or by district would preclude neither of those. things from happening. Can you show otherwise?
I’m not sure the sheriff – new or old – can do that. Remember….the posses are private non-profit corporations.
That said I think the new sheriff could disavow the Cold Case Posse and cut it off from SO resources.
Of course that’s nonsense because births in Hawaii were reported in the newspapers long before they were numbered in the monthly batches. Yes, they would have to have been filed (meaning that the hospital reported them), and yes they would have to have been accepted (all the legal requirements checked), but reporting to the press doesn’t require numbering.
Indeed they did. I was surprised, coming out of a college computer science curriculum, what I found going into public health agencies in the 70’s who had no automation. They got along pretty well.
True, and that’s the line the current sherrif has taken. But when the posse was requested to disclose its financial information, it said it wasn’t required to because it is effectively under the MCSO’s umbrella.
Both Gallups and Zullo have indicated that they will no longer be posse members under the new sherriff; I sense that ax has already fallen.
Example: Around 1980, when very few small offices were computerized, I was hired by a small Wall St. consulting firm to select an appropriate small computer system and program it from scratch to accept, organize, and selectively output the firm’s data. The job would be essentially trivial today.
While waiting for the hardware to be assembled and for me to finish the programing, I implemented a McBee Keysort system (http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X328.84,
https://www.mcbeeinc.com/). It was bulky and cumbersome by today’s standards, but it did the job.
Yes, that’s the old Zullo tap dance. The only way to force financial info out of him will be for the state or IRS to go after him. I’m not holding my breath.
Hard to tell but now Zullo can ride off into the sunset claiming he did what needed to be done.
Please wake me up if you ever excrete a thought that is *not* random, would ya jack? You really need to work on your “must have –> because” subroutine (I long ago came to the conclusion that you are an artificial intelligence troll-bot designed to test the tolerance of rational people).
IF ridiculous AND Obama hashing THEN Make idiot of yourself by spouting it.
Joey, parse the statements made there, and try to figure out when the actions were accomplished.
any English teacher would require a re-write to properly show what she means.
LOL
It hardly matters. She has no personal knowledge of when the certificates were numbered, nor does she remember Stanley Ann Obama at the hospital. Her well-meaning speculation has no more validity than a birther’s ill-meaning speculation.
If you don’t know when the numbers are put on the birth certificates, then you have no knowledge of when anything happened
The numbers are not put on the birth certificates at the hospital, although you can claim they were, because the registrar has not accepted the birth certificate.
Oh you think that hospital has a bunch of number stamped birth records , and they just pulled one out of a file and filled it in, and the number would be issued before the baby was born?
And the birth certificates are distributed to the hospitals all over Hawaii with number already in them?
Of course,
Visualize a state office receiving 500 -1,000 bc’s on the first of the month, and then having to schedule the clerks to process the case, review them, and route them to the proper persons. Please remember that the birth record is not the single page you are looking at, and all of the information must be reviewed to meet the standards.
Any manager would require daily input of document so that the clerks can schedule them within their normal work loads. I did 200-250 home loans in a month, and I sure as hell could not do that if they all came in on the first of the month. As I had to discuss them with the appraisers , inspectors, credit manager, and then route them to the district manager.
I was trying to point that out to Joey
How can you discern well-meaning from ill-meaning on the boards?
Hell, I was working back in 1961 , and I can tell you that it was a lot slower then that it is now. We still had mechanical typewriters, used snail mail, and it cost money to telephone people.
What Mrs. Nordyke does know is when her twins were born and what their birth certificate numbers are.
She assumed that Obama’s number is higher because her twins were born in the afternoon and Obama was born in the evening. But it’s also true that “Obama” would follow “Nordyke” in alphabetical order.
That’s an absurd statement. Even without knowing that date that the filing number was stamped on the birth certificate, we know when the child was born and we know when the birth certificate was accepted by the registrar.
What are you talking about? Nobody has suggested that the birth certificates are stamped with a certificate number at the hospital. The stamping was done by the Department of Health.
Again, what are you talking about? Nobody believes that the hospital stamps the birth certificates.
Wow, you sure managed to cram a lot of nonsense into one note.
To the contrary, I think anyone with 6th grade reading comprehension can grasp what she has said.
Still more nonsense from the unrelentingly obtuse Trader Jack.
The clerks who did the stamping didn’t have to review the birth certificates. The reviewing had already been done by the registrar, Verna Lee. Or do you believe that she was in the practice of accepting birth certificates without reviewing them? Nor did they have to “route them to the proper persons.” Once the birth certificates were stamped, they all went to the same place. They were already in alphabetical order. All the clerks had to do was stamp them. I can’t imagine that a couple of clerks would have any trouble stamping a thousand birth certificates in a single work day.
Earth to Trader Jack – stamping birth certificates is different than approving home loans.
In July, 1967, when I was stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines, my fellow sailors and I typed and transmitted 4256 messages in a 33-hour period. That’s 129 messages per hour, and I can assure you that each one took longer to do than stamping a birth certificate.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars chimes in with his own unique take on the birth certificate.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-false-flag-to-divert-from-obamas-non-existent-islamic-ring/
Correction; I mistakenly wrote above that Mrs. Nordyke thought that Obama has a higher birth certificate number because he was born after her twins. Actually, she thought that he has a higher birth certificate number because she believes that she was admitted to the hospital before Obama’s mother was admitted. Obama was born on August 4 and the Nordyke twins were born on August 5.
Of course, Mrs. Nordyke is mistaken on that point. Obama has a higher number because “O’ comes after “N.”
Of all the people 2016 put in a body bag, he wasn’t one of them. We lost artists, musicians, poets, people who contributed to culture as a whole…but we still have Alex Jones…
Why do you bother with all these goofy straw men? What is “process the case” even supposed to mean? Who was “scheduling clerks” in 1961? You had clerks. They had jobs. They did them.
Yes, the universe was more manual in 1960 than it is in 2016. That is why routine, high volume records like birth certificates were processed in batch rather than real time. This is particularly true when that processing includes steps where multiple inputs (say, records from multiple hospitals) must be consolidated into a single searchable archive.
And searchability here is key. What use is a document that is later hard to find? The single most important criterion at the department of heath for any filing system is to make sure records can be found when they are needed. And in 1961 you could not go to some green screen terminal and perform a boolean search through a database. When people needed to find a record, they usually came in with two data points; name and general date of birth.
That is why (and this is true globally of birth certificates going back at least as far as 1810 when Napoleon invented the damn things) the single most common way of sorting and storing birth records was alphabetically by month of birth. Because that is the easiest way to manual search them later.
So… regardless of any “scheduling of clerks” or “routing” or “reviewing” or any other red herring, there was a step where the certificates were sorted alphabetically, in a monthly batch, and stored that way. And we know empirically from the numbers themselves (of which we have at least a half dozen examples from August of 1961) that this is how they were numbered (to the exclusion of any other theory offered by birthers for the last 8 years).
That’s just dumb. Month end processing of many different sorts is as much a “normal work load” as daily would be.
And none of that resembles in any way what is required for month-end batch processing of birth certificates.
The reality is that in offices like the vital statistics registrar was that they had a given number of people available to do the job and that was how it was done. Since babies aren’t born on any kind of schedule but their own there was/is no way to schedule around them except statistically, and even that is a crap shoot. The simple fact was that the affidavits were processed at the various hospitals etc as the people there got to them, usually fairly current I’m sure, but would depend on staffing and case load. When they were done there they went to the local registrar who had to record them and then process them to go on to the state registrar, more delay, and then once they got to the state registrar, in dribs and drabs, they would have been reviewed and then sorted in to a general rough sort that would be refined over the course of the month. Reality being what it is, it is entirely possible for some affidavits to come in quite late for having been born at the last of the month and then delayed in processing, but they would had to have been added to the processing for the month they were born in. There is no reason, or evidence, to say that the August affidavits were actually processed in August at all, but probably sometime in Sept after the last of the stragglers had been processed and in sorted. They would still count as August births, but the final processing and filing may well not have happened until sometime in Sept, which would also account for some of the oddness in numbering.
Yes, and it’s not as if stamping birth certificates with numbers was the only work that the clerks did.
Trader Jack, as is his wont, makes assumptions about things for which he has no knowledge. He assumes that if the birth certificates are filed alphabetically and then stamped at the end of a month, they all have to be stamped in one day. But there is no reason to believe that all of the August, 1961 birth certificates were stamped on September 1. As Notorial Dissent pointed out, it is likely that they waited several weeks until they knew that the registrar had received and accepted all of the state’s August birth certificates before the process of stamping them with certificate numbers began. And there would have been no reason why the stamping couldn’t stop at 5:00 p.m. one day and be resumed the next day.
And then Trader Jack rambles on about birth certificates being pre-numbered or numbered by the hospitals, neither of which makes any sense.
Except they didn’t all come in on the first of the month. Here’s the law describing the transmittal schedule:
So they came into the state office every week, not every month, and the outlying islands were required to airmail on the fourth so that everything from that month would be in hand by the 7th of each month. If receiving a weekly batch all at once was too much to handle, there was nothing preventing the department from setting a delivery schedule so that individual local offices delivered on specific days of the week. Weekly transmittal is further supported by the weekly announcement in the newspapers from the HDoH of births.
IIRC, under DOH rules the outer islands had up to week after the end of the month to turn in all the birth certificates for that month.
Trader also has no clue that certain processes have tasks that take the same time whether they process 1 or 1,000 items. Filing new records almost always does and doing only a couple may have extra steps not required if you do bulk processing. Doing a process daily may add many hours more staff time per month than to do them just once a month. Organizations always have to balance the turn-around needs with the total processing cost.
For my church position, there are resources that help churches determine time requirements for paid church musicians. The worksheets breakdown a week by things like service playing, practice, rehearsals, planning, meetings and other tasks. However, it is not saying you do each task with the same time weekly. If uses an average. Planning often happens in bulk and often in the summer when other tasks are less. No matter your contracted weekly hours, Christmas and Easter will be many, many, many hours more. Again, Summer usually has less hours.
My personal suspicion, from working around offices like that, that the affidavits came in in dribs and drabs. The registrars with hospitals in their districts would probably only send out once a week where some of the outlying ones maybe only once a month, would depend on their activity. When they got to DOH then they would most likely have been aggregated and sorted as they came in or at specific times depending on work flow, when you do that kind of continuous repetitious work you figure out a flow pattern that works best and then stick to it. A lot would also depend on volume as well. As to numbered certificates at the hospitals, pure nonsense, in the first place they weren’t certificates, they were affidavits, and they most likely came in a pad and were used as necessary, and unless they were better typists than most of the hospital help I worked with they probably had to start over either for errors, incorrect information, or other problems. Nowadays I would suspect they have a word processing program that takes the data and generates the entire affidavit for signature.
If Zullo wants media attention, he’s got it!
RC posted the following at fogbow….
“Morgan Loew at CBS 5 posted this on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/morganloewtv/p … 1323983798
Here is what you did not hear during Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s final “birther” news conference, where he announced that his Cold Case Posse investigation concluded that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fake:
1. It was not a real investigation. There is no DR number connected to it, like there would be for a real case. There were never any MCSO files created for it.
2. The “investigator” is not a real deputy. He’s a former car salesman, without AZ POST certification. He’s not a detective.
3. The Cold Case Posse does not investigate “cold cases” and it isn’t a real posse. It consists of one man. The car salesman.
4. Every time the car salesman has pointed to some detail that he claimed showed part of the president’s birth certificate is fake, REAL computer experts have showed that his allegations are just made up.
There is a real news story here. But it’s about the sheriff wasting taxpayer money on this boondoggle.
That could be one of the reasons the sheriff refused to answer any questions today.”
OUCH! That’s gonna leave a scar.
Give this blog (and Doc) its due: These are all things we first discussed here years ago.