Barack Obama's Birth Certificate Scandal

The media attention surrounding Obama's birth certificate has been astounding. It was difficult for a while to have media attention on anything else. First, his Live Birth certificate was released, then his Long Form certificate.

In 2008, in response to media inquiries, the President’s campaign requested his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. The state sent the campaign the President’s birth certificate, the same legal documentation provided to all Hawaiians as proof of birth in state, and the campaign immediately posted it on the internet. That birth certificate can be seen here (PDF).

When any citizen born in Hawaii requests their birth certificate, they receive exactly what the President received. In fact, the document posted on the campaign website is what Hawaiians use to get a driver’s license from the state and the document recognized by the Federal Government and the courts for all legal purposes. That’s because it is the birth certificate. This is not and should not be an open question.
The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting. President Barack Obama's long form birth certificate can be seen here (PDF):

Birth certificate-long-form

Correspondence with the Hawaii State Department of Health can be seen here (PDF).
At a time of great consequence for this country – when we should be debating how we win the future, reduce our deficit, deal with high gas prices, and bring stability to the Middle East, Washington, DC, was once again distracted by a fake issue.  The President’s hope is that with this step, we can move on to debating the bigger issues that matter to the American people and the future of the country.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/27/president-obamas-long-form-birth-certificate?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

Here is the Certificate of Live Birth, image courtesy Snopes:

 http://msgboard.snopes.com/politics/graphics/birth.jpg

 Here is the "official" Certificate of Live Birth posted on the White House site.

http://whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate.pdf

Why is the "official" Live Birth certificate from the White House a low-quality copy? Why does it have a URL from Snopes at the bottom?

And the Long Form Live Birth certificate.


http://whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate.pdf

Any original document would have been simply scanned and released in it's unedited form. It would simply be a single layer of raster (pixels) art saved as a PDF file. The thing to be critical about is the fact that the Live Birth certificate is exactly that, a single layer image, but the Long Form is heavily modified. The information in the document states that it was created in Mac OS X 10.6.7 as well.

Here is a video that shows what happens when one opens the official PDF file in Adobe Illustrator:



It appears that Snopes is more credible in providing Obama's Live Birth certificate than the White House, so the administration posted the one they found on the Snopes site.

It also appears that the Long Form certificate for some reason was altered or cleaned up. This is the only reason that there would be visible layers in the file. The quality of the works implies minimum experience of graphic design software, such as you might find as Kinko's.