> And the FEC does NOT require a birth certificate!
WHY don’t they?
How would you expect me to know? Most likely because this issue has never come up (that someone was not born in the US who ran for president).
I just added this to my blog post about Fukino’s e-mail. I’ve got clickable links to the sources cited there at http://butterdezillion.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/confirmation-that-certificate-number-given-by-state-registrar%e2%80%99s-office/ :
UPDATE - Feb 25, 2010
What Fukino stated about the state registrar assigning the certificate numbers is regularly stated in the National Vital Statistics Reports when they explain why using 50% sampling is still accurate. For instance, on page 232 of the 1961 National Vital Statistics Report on Natality it says:
“With few exceptions, records are numbered in the State offices of vital stadstics as they are received from the local offices. The assignment of the last digit in the number is not selective, and the systematic sample of even-numbered records may be assumed to be unbiased. Furthermore, because the records are almost always in geographic order before numbering, twice the sample count of births occurrring in the great majority of counties in table 3-1 in Section 3 is virtually the same as the corresponding figure based on all records,”
On page 356 of the 1971 Report a similar statement is made - although we know from the DOH Administrative Rules, Chapter 8, Section 4 that local registrars were to devlier certificates to the State Registrar’s office weekly rather than monthly (except for outlying islands, which were to mail certificates on the 4th of the month). Page 347 of the 1971 report contains an image of the 1968 revision of the standard birth certificate, which includes a space to record a local file number as well as the birth number - reflecting that the local registrars keep their own file numbers for locating the documents but the birth (or certificate) number is distinct from that.