I don’t think politically motivated sham investigations outside of its jurisdiction should be the mission of anything associated with law enforcement. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Questions have surrounded the CCP since it became involved in Arpaio’s birth certificate investigation, particularly regarding financial oversight. The Posse is a 501(c)(3) but it reports its activities to no one, not the IRS and not the Sheriff’s Office. How much was spent on con men and junkets has not been accounted for publicly. One news report mentioned a $40,000 number attributed to the Sheriff’s Office, and $10,000 came out in an email disclosed during the Melendres case. Those came before Zullo’s relationship with the Italian forensic laboratory. In an official filing, the CCP stated:

Maricopa County Arizona is definitely a governmental unit and since we are it affiliates again that requirement of filing said form does not apply to us.

However, when I contacted the Sheriff’s Office to obtain the oversight records, they said:

The Sheriff’s Office is in no way involved in the day to day financial dealings of any posse that works under the authority of the Sheriff. … They conduct their own fundraising and handle their own financial matters completely separate from the Sheriff’s Office.

Thanks, Paul, for a nice going-away present. I wish you and the people of Maricopa County the best going forward.

The Cold Case Posse as a corporation apart from the Sheriff’s Office still exists as long as they continue to file the paperwork with the State of Arizona. Their web site shut down some time before November 15 last year, but the MCSOCCP.org domain was inexplicably renewed until December 9, 2017. [Update: Renewed through 12/9/2018] [Update: currently set to expire Feb 24, 2019.] [Update: Expired]

H/t to CarlOrcas.

This part presents an experiment in which I attempt to answer the question of how consistent date stamp angles are when a document like Obama’s is stamped.

Experimental Design

I begin with some assumptions: The first is that the person who stamped the date in Box 20, “Date accepted by Local Reg.” is same person who signed Box 21, “Signature of Local Registrar.” That means that the same person who stamped Obama’s certificate also stamped that of Johanna Ah’nee, the one Mike Zullo said was copied for part of a putative fake Obama certificate. Indeed, most published birth certificates contemporary with Obama’s were signed by “V. K. Lee” and I’m going to conclude that she signed literally thousands of birth certificates every year. That was her job, stamping dates on Box 20, day in and day out, year in and year out. Such repetitive tasks will create muscle memory and they can be completed with little conscious effort. Lee had been signing certificates for years before Obama was born.

In my experiment I created facsimiles of a blank Hawaiian birth certificate, and stamped a bunch of them. I created 50 samples and used the following procedure:

• Remove a form from a stack
• Pick up a rubber stamp and stamp inside Box 20.
• Sign the form
• Place the form in another stack face down
• Repeat the procedure for 10 forms
• Push back the chair, get up and walk around so that my precise sitting position and body posture could change
• Increment the date stamp
• Repeat the entire procedure 4 more times, completing all 50 forms.

I am making the “blank” form available as a PDF file so that others can check my results. (The text “Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital” was left on the form for scaling purposes.) Note that my form is bigger than Obama’s birth certificate because it’s not reduced like the birth certificate. I can determine actual size by the 10 characters per inch spacing of the typewriter font.

The next experimental concern is measuring the stamp angle and assessing the margin of error in that measurement.

Results

Ms. Conspiracy (who also holds the MS degree) offered a criticism of the experimental design. She felt that rather than pick up a stamp, a pen, a stamp, a pen, etc. that an office worker would stamp them all, then sign them all. So I did an additional run of 20 forms stamped without putting the date stamp down. These weren’t signed. The two trials were named Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 respectively and the forms for review are in the order stamped.

Notes

• It seemed that variation was more caused by the angle at which the stamp was grasped, than the position of the arm.
• Paper positioning is also a source of variation.
• I was surprised in the amount of variation in angle seen in Experiment 2. I’m not sure why.
• The forms in Experiment 1 were printed directly from the “paint” program. That program then printed to PDF and the PDF was printed for Experiment 2. The two forms are not exactly the same size.

Most recently in Zullo’s December 15, 2016, attempt, he seemed to be making a statistical claim, even though his sources were not qualified by Zullo as statisticians, and Zullo’s refusal to disclose the methodology and analysis used confounds peer review.

What I will do in this article is talk in general about a statistical fallacies that may  underlay Zullo’s argument, and then in Part 2 present my own experiment and analysis.

Debunking many birther claims is within the reach of the non-expert. If a birther says “X” is impossible, it is only necessary to show an example of “X” to prove it false. This business of the date stamp angles is going to require some expertise. Plausible–sounding statistical arguments can be wrong. As I frequently say, “I am not a real doctor, but I have a Masters Degree, in Science!” For this debunking, I am going to play the expert card, my MS in Mathematics from Clemson University.

Fallacy

The week I was born a man made 28 passes in a row at a Las Vegas dice table, something said to have only one chance in ten million of happening. Remarkable? The fact is that millions play dice every year, and that when something like this happens, it makes the newspapers. If an experiment is tried enough times, then unlikely outcomes become likely to occur. Ignoring the number of trials is the fallacy. Unusual events pique our interest, but they should not surprise us. These things happen every week.

A great example is the Pick 3 lottery number winner in Illinois the night after Obama was elected President: 666. What are the odds of that? Would you say “one in a thousand” (.001)? Notice that the event happened the day after the election, not on the day of the election. If it happened on the day of the election, the same claim of oddity would have been made. So isn’t the question better answered “what is the probability that 666 would come up within two days of the election?” So the .001 probability becomes .001999.  But wouldn’t an anomaly have been declared if the number came up on Obama’s birthday? Inauguration day? The day the Electoral College voted? And would a claim had been made if the number came up in Hawaii’s lottery? If a longer winning number started or ended with “666”? The question becomes: “what is the probability that 666 could come up in some context related somehow to Barack Obama over some period of time?” There are many significant Obama events and things that can be coincidental with them. So what the actual question is: if you look at every detail of Obama’s life and every item coincident to it, what is the probability that a few odd things will be found? (And what about my 666 watch story?)

Another statistical fallacy, the prosecutor’s fallacy, was made by Christopher Monckton’s when he used calculations of the improbability of a combination of anomalies he thought were in Obama’s birth certificate as evidence that it was a fake.

At its heart, the [prosecutor’s] fallacy involves assuming that the prior probability of a random match is equal to the probability that the defendant is guilty.

For instance, if a perpetrator is known to have the same blood type as a defendant and 10% of the population share that blood type, then to argue on that basis alone that the probability of the defendant being guilty is 90% makes the prosecutor’s fallacy (in a very simple form).

— Wikipedia

His case was further undermined by the fact that his anomalies weren’t anomalous and that he used calculations for independent events, when the events were correlated.

Improbable events occur in our lives all the time. What were the chances that my wife visiting Kiev (population 2.8 million) in the Ukraine would have a chance meeting on the street with another graduate of Auburn University, when neither of them was wearing any emblem of that school? Do the math!

Here’s another example: The old philosophical problem of proving a negative. The example is the proposition, “all ravens are black.” It can’t be proven because it is false, but white ravens are rare. What is the probability that I would come across not one but three of them? If I decided to go looking in my back yard, the answer is “extremely small” (I don’t get ravens at all), but if I went looking for “white raven” in Google Images, not so unusual. And to tweak the result further, in all honesty I wasn’t looking for a set of three when I started out. I changed the rules after the fact.

The story has gone around that college math professors get extra income by betting their classes that at least two people in the class will have the same birthday. Would you take that bet? Let’s do the math:

We’ll pick our first student and then compare that one to each of the others. Each student we compare has a 1 in 365 chance of matching, and a 364/365 chance of not matching. For the next student there are 363 dates that won’t match the first two, so the chance of theirs being different is 363/365. One multiples the two fractions together to get the compound probability of the teacher losing the bet for two students. The amazing result is that at 23 students, the odds are roughly 50/50 that there will be a match. For a class size of 30 the professor has a 75% chance of winning and with a class of 100, the chance of the professor losing is about one in a million. The object of the story is that improbable events are likely to occur in large samples.

The same mistake, ignoring sample size, leads to false identifications associating two online personages. What are the chances that two different people posted photos from the same PhotoBucket account and live in the same state, and have initials “RB.” I don’t know the odds, but there are two.

Let’s bring the examples a little closer to home. Let’s say I have a Hawaiian birth certificate, and an instance on one form where two characters have a certain spatial relationship, and then find another form where the two letters are in exactly the same relationship to each other. Let’s say that through some argument (that may be fallacious) you determine that the odds are one in a thousand that pairs would correspond. Have I found a very unlikely event? The answer is no for at least two reasons. First, I picked the pair after I found the correspondence. There are 196 typed characters on Obama’s birth certificate, yielding 19,110 pairs of characters to compare. So finding a one in a thousand event in a sample of 19,110 is not unlikely at all; it’s almost inevitable (better than the one in a million in our birthday example). The second error is assuming that the positions of the characters is independent. In fact a typewriter is designed to consistently put characters in exactly the same relation to other characters, line by line, day by day, in a grid that is 6 lines per inch vertically and 10 characters per inch horizontally. So rather than compute a probability assuming that the spacing is random (events are independent), we should be asking the question of how probable is it that these two character pairs are in the same relative position given that they were typed on the same model of typewriter (and based on font analysis, it appears that the same model Kapi’olani hospital typewriter typed all of its birth certificates), and likely the same typewriter.

Let me emphasize that we do not know anything about the methodology, analysis or assumptions made in the reports that Zullo talks about, but refuses to release. They may be sophisticated or naive, but they are almost inevitably wrong unless you assess the probability of a massive mutigenerational cover-up of the facts of Obama’s birth involving multiple administrations of both parties in the Hawaii Department of Health, 1961 Honolulu newspapers, and numerous White House staffers and the President of the United States as having a probability greater than one in a thousand. I doubt that we will ever see the analyses from Mike Zullo. I cannot critique what I haven’t seen and the confidentiality of his relationships with his experts is a screen that Mike Zullo hides behind.

What I do know is that the analysts Zullo consulted did their work based on samples that Zullo supplied, samples that could have been selected to skew the outcome. For example, we know that Reed Hayes was given the White House birth certificate PDF to look at, while not being shown the photographs of it, photographs that call into question his conclusions that no paper document existed. Hayes naively saw the pixelated portion of Stanley Ann Dunham Obama’s signature as proof that the signature was done in two parts, when in fact this was Xerox layer separation artifact that Hayes would not have seen had he been given other images of the birth certificate to work with. Was ForLab shown all of the date stamp samples in my article, or was the very close 1959 date angle omitted, and the very different Nordyke certificate, stamped by a different clerk, included?

Stay tuned for Part 2 where Doc gets his hands dirty with a real experiment.

But hang on a second, George, we’re not questioning the legitimacy of the outcome of the election. You didn’t have Republicans questioning whether or not Obama legitimately beat John McCain in 2008.

I rest my case.

The photo shows Priebus and California Republican senate candidate Orly Taitz who filed a dozen lawsuits challenging Obama’s eligibility.

The first Lee certificate is from June of 1961, the one that had “Colored” crossed out and “Negro” substituted.

Next is a 1959 certificate from the Territory of Hawaii, shown by WND:

Here’s President Obama’s certificate:

Here’s the Coats certificate:

This one was from April of 1961:

Ah’nee:

Is there a pattern here?

Mike Zullo has never laid out a neat and organized explanation of how he believes Barack Obama’s birth certificate was forged. He seems now to have admitted that creation of the document released by the White House somehow involved scanning a piece of paper with a Xerox machine (whereas before he said it was wholly computer-generated file). Zullo seems to be saying now that Obama’s birth certificate was assembled from some large number of other birth certificates, one letter from one, one word from another, and for some little more than an angle was copied. It seems like a hugely time-consuming task fraught with painstaking alignment and selection. It also requires collusion from someone with a large number of birth certificates at their disposal (i.e., the Hawaii Department of Health). Positing a nearly-impossible document creation process and a big conspiracy is certainly thinking outside the box, but I think that the boundaries of that box are the limits between normal and crazy.

If the job of forging the president’s birth certificate were given to you, how would you do it? It’s relatively straightforward. The hard part, something that even Mike Zullo stumbled over, is getting the form contextually right, knowing all those little penciled codes, and the name of a physician at Kapi’olani Hospital and a clerk at the Hawaii Department of Health.¹ Once you know what to put on the certificate, then you get a blank birth certificate form. If you’re the Hawaii Department of Health, maybe you have one in the archives, and if not you can just take any existing certificate and clean it up in its entirety. (Remember that the certificates in the archives are not on security paper.) Next you buy an old typewriter and type the information in. Forge some signatures, photocopy it onto readily available security paper, add a rubber stamp,  seal, and you’re done. I mean, that’s how the guy who forged Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate did it. It makes no sense to get letters from dozens of birth certificates when an old typewriter will make a perfect imitation of an old typewriter.

Indeed before Mike Zullo, the scenario I offered was posited by birthers. This appeared at the RepubX forum on or before April 2009:

They have already prepared the forgery with special paper and ink. The document was printed on a fully functional 1960 Heidelberger printing press located at a print museum in Toronto. Access was arranged by a trustee of the museum who is connected to a large Canadian banking/investment firm with major US interests.

The blanks in the forged form were filled in with an old Underwood Manual typewriter bought at an estate sale in Skokie, IL. The raised seal was the easiest piece to fake, since you can by [sic] a special order corporate seal from just about any online office supply store.

The only reason they haven’t rolled out the foregery [sic] yet is that it is “seasoning” under mild UV light and a back and forth rotation between between a humidifier and a sauna. Get ready….one to two months tops.

¹One of the great unsolved problems of the birther movement is that if Obama’s birth certificate is a fabrication, whose certificate has Obama’s number? The one thing that the birthers got right is that birth certificate number are sequential. Some birthers think that the certificate is that of Virginia Sunahara, but if that is so, then who owns the number shown on Sunahara’s certificate? It’s the same problem birthers have with Obama’s social-security number—if it’s not his, then whose is it?