Who is Responsible for Verifying Presidential Eligibility?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jul. 26, 2024) — As posted Tuesday by the “X” account @Kancel Kamala, on August 20, 2020, then-Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Christopher John England sent a “Certification” to then-Alabama Secretary of State John H. Merrill naming the party’s 2020 nominees for President and Vice President, respectively, as “Joseph R. Biden” and “Kamala D. Harris.”

The 18-page set of documents remains available at the Alabama Secretary of State’s website.

As part of the “certification” process, each nominee provided a signed and notarized “Consent to Nomination of the Democratic Party” and “affirmed” he or she was constitutionally qualified for the position sought on November 3, 2020 (pp. 8 and 9 below).

The constitutional requirements of the presidency in Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, and imposed on the vice-president by the 1804 ratification of the 12th Amendment, are that the president and commander-in-chief be 35 years of age or older, have resided within the United States for a minimum of 14 years, and be a “natural born Citizen.”

Included with the Alabama document package are an “Official Certification of Nomination”; a notice signed by then-Democratic National Committee Chair Thomas E. Perez asserting Biden and Harris were “legally qualified” to serve; and signed statements from nine Democrat electors pledging their votes to Biden and Harris should they have been declared the winners.

What is a “natural born Citizen?”

There exists no U.S. Supreme Court ruling on point defining the term “natural born Citizen.” However, the issue was touched upon in the 1875 decision in Minor v. Happersett when Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote for the unanimous court:

The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first.

Within the current vacuum and an increasing number of foreign-born persons seeking high office, some observers and legal analysts say “natural born Citizen” signifies simply a person born in the United States without regard to his or her parents’ citizenship status at the time. Others insist the Founders intended the term to restrict the nation’s chief executive to only the highest level of allegiance necessitating U.S.-citizen parents, pointing to the fact that Article I requires members of Congress to be “a citizen of the United States” for seven or nine years, respectively, but not “natural born.”

The late constitutional attorney Herb Titus believed the parents’ citizenship was paramount to a person’s birthplace in determining “natural born” status.

In an expansion of the interpretation favoring solely birth on U.S. soil, former Solicitors General Neal Katyal (D) and Paul Clement (R) opined in a 2015 essay that “natural born Citizen” applies to “someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time,” including “persons born abroad” if born to at least one U.S.-citizen parent.

The essay was published several days after Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R), born in Canada to a U.S.-citizen mother and Cuban-citizen father and possessing a Canadian birth certificate and citizenship, declared himself a U.S. presidential candidate.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, is often incorrectly cited as defining “natural born Citizen,” but the term appears nowhere in its text. Rather, it “granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War, including them under the umbrella phrase ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States,’” Encyclopedia Britannica explains.

Proponents of the definition requiring parental U.S. citizenship in addition to birth in the United States cite Rep. John Bingham, considered the main author of the 14th Amendment, and Section 212 of Emmerich de Vattel’s “The Law of Nations,” which states, “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”

Did Biden/Harris Really Win?

Arising from the pandemic, the tumultuous 2020 election saw a change in “voting systems and laws,” including exponentially-expanded “voting by mail”; an infusion of some $350 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation to be utilized for “election administration”; initial indications that incumbent president Donald Trump was ahead in several key “swing” states, only for those leads to mysteriously evaporate overnight; the counting of votes beyond legislated state deadlines; county and state data failing to match in Pennsylvania; and Republican observers reportedly denied admittance in certain Pennsylvania precincts and other locations as ballots were counted as well as before the election, among other anomalies.

On November 7, four days after Election Day, Biden and Harris were declared the victors.

The Trump campaign challenged the results through numerous court actions but did not receive a hearing on the merits. In Texas v. Pennsylvania, which claimed the bending of election laws in Pennsylvania and three other states affected Texas and 15 other plaintiff states, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court denied Texas’s request to file a Bill of Complaint for lack of “standing.”

The Associated Press, which says it “works with Facebook” to perform “fact-checking,” reported in December 2020 that Biden received some 81 million votes as opposed to Barack Obama’s 69 million in 2008. At the same time, Trump reportedly received “7 Million More [Votes] Than Any Sitting President in History.”

USA Today wrote that “it’s plausible that Joe Biden set a popular vote record by carrying only 509 counties, or 17% of all counties” while admitting, “Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.“

The media consistently refuted Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud, as did Trump’s Department of Justice and the FBI. Shortly after noon on January 20, 2021, Donald and Melania Trump left Washington on the traditional helicopter flyover bound for Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where Trump established residency in 2019.

Self-Affirmed Affidavits Notarized by Biden “Bodyman”

Biden and Harris’s “Consent to Nomination” forms were notarized by Stephen Michael Goepfert, who according to CNN served as Biden’s White House “bodyman” until departing in August 2022 to become deputy director of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Implementation.”

CNN continued:

Goepfert’s emergence in Biden’s inner sanctum was accelerated by the unprecedented challenge of holding the role on a presidential campaign in the middle of a once in a century pandemic – a public health crisis that largely limited Biden to his Wilmington, Delaware, home for months.

Covid precautions limited Biden and his aides to remote contact for nearly his entire campaign. It was Goepfert who was physically there to help set up those Zoom calls, media interviews, tweak speeches and remarks, connect donor calls, put the briefing book together and finalize memos.

According to the New York Post on August 23, 2022, Goepfert “started working as Biden’s personal aide in 2019 during the presidential campaign. Prior to that role, Goepfert also worked in Biden’s circle when he was a senior adviser to the then-vice president’s chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti.”

“His leaving the administration marks the latest in a string of departures across Biden’s team, the vice president’s office and the press office,” the Post‘s article continues of Goepfert.

Richetti is reportedly one of the close Biden aides who crafted Biden’s exit from the 2024 campaign announced this past Sunday, paving the way for Harris to run in his place against Trump, who announced his intention to run on November 15, 2022.

In June of last year Perez assumed the positions of “senior advisor to the president of the United States” and director of “White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.”

Obama Eligibility Question Spurned by Courts, Media, Despite Findings of Forgery

After first-term U.S. senator Barack Hussein Obama declared he would seek the presidency in February 2007, citizens located credible reports claiming he was born in Kenya or Indonesia and began asking if he was a “natural born Citizen” as the Constitution requires.

One such report was from then-MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, who claimed Obama was “born in Indonesia” but later demonized anyone questioning whether Obama was born in Hawaii, as Obama claimed during the campaign.

In a phenomenon not seen before, articles suggesting a foreign birth for Obama were discredited or hastily changed to say he was born in Honolulu. A number of lawsuits, including Kerchner v. Obama & Congress filed just before Obama and Biden took office, did not receive a hearing at the Supreme Court.

Several ballot challenges arising in 2012 as Obama sought re-election were similarly unsuccessful in determining whether Obama met the definition of “natural born Citizen” as administrative law judges accepted the “long-form” image as genuine despite on-the-record analyses to the contrary.

In 2016, a ballot challenge requesting adjudication of Cruz’s eligibility met a similar fate.

Nancy Pelosi and the 2008 Obama Nominating Papers

On the DNC’s 2008 nominating forms, then-DNC Chair Nancy Pelosi asserted to the State of Hawaii that Obama was “legally qualified” to serve as president, along with vice-presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden, Jr. A different form was sent to the other 49 states absent that wording.

Hawaii statute §11-113 requires that presidential and vice-presidential candidates be affirmed as “legally qualified” on the party’s nominating forms.

The Democratic Party of Hawaii did not so state on its own primary nomination form that year. Rather, its wording reads, “THIS IS TO CERTIFY that the following candidates for President and Vice President of the United States are legally qualified to serve under the provisions of the national Democratic Parties balloting at the Presidential Preference Poll and Caucus held on February 19th, 2008 in the State of Hawaii and by acclamation at the National Democratic Convention held August 27, 2008 in Denver, Colorado.

In Arizona, Obama provided a signed an affidavit claiming he was “a natural born citizen of the United States” as well as meeting the age and residency requirements expressed in Article II. Whether the affidavit was accompanied by supporting documentation is an open question.

Obama “Wins” the Election

On November 4, 2008, Obama and Biden were declared the winners over Sen. John McCain, whose own eligibility had been questioned and legally challenged prior to the election, and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Still, many believed Obama was ineligible to serve. As the year 2010 came to a close, then-businessman Donald J. Trump began making strident demands that Obama release his “long-form” birth certificate presumably proving his eligibility. Finally, on April 27, 2011, the White House released what it said was a PDF of the original document allegedly held by the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH).

Following the release of the image online, Trump reacted with, “I am really honored frankly to have played such a big role in hopefully, hopefully, getting rid of this issue. We have to look at it, we have to see is it real, is it proper, what’s on it, but I hope it checks out beautifully. I am really proud, I am really honored.”

However, rising concerns of fraud and forgery among more than 250 constituents of then-Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph Arpaio prompted him to ask his “Cold Case Posse” to launch an investigation. Led by former private investigator Mike Zullo, after approximately six months, the probe found the image to be a “computer-generated forgery” presented to the public “with the intent to deceive.”

Neither the mainstream media nor the FBI ever investigated the probe’s findings, even after Zullo revealed that two U.S. intelligence agents informed him it was “an open secret” in the nation’s capital that Obama was born outside of the country.

In addition to the questionable “long-form” birth-certificate image, Obama’s proffered life narrative claimed his father was never a U.S. citizen, leading some constitutional scholars and citizen researchers to conclude that even if he were born in Hawaii as he claimed, Obama could not have met the Founders’ definition of “natural born Citizen.”

Where Do Secretaries of State Come In?

In 2013, Arpaio’s lead investigator on the birth-certificate case, Mike Zullo, filed a sworn affidavit with the Alabama Supreme Court in an appeal of the case Hugh McInnish, et al, v. Beth Chapman, Secretary of State, et al. The case arose when McInnish and his co-plaintiffs alleged that Chapman’s duties should have included the vetting of presidential candidates participating in the 2012 election.

Within the same time frame, March 2013, McInnish told the website VDare:

I am one of the plaintiffs in the case of McInnish v. Chapman, the latter being Alabama’s Secretary of State Beth Chapman, who is responsible for election. The case is now making its way into the Alabama Supreme Court, and I want you to know about it.

Briefly, we are claiming that the Secretary of State has failed in her duty to verify the eligibility of the presidential candidates, especially in the case of one Barack Obama, and we are asking for a writ of mandamus directing her to demand from Obama a bona fide birth certificate.

Yes, I know the election is over, but the question is not moot. Compare Roe v. Wade in which the baby had long since been born, but the case was not moot because it was a matter of great public importance. Whether a man sitting in the Oval Office is an impostor is by any measure a question of great public importance.

In response to McInnish‘s appeal to the state supreme court, the Alabama Democratic Party filed a “Motion for Leave to File Amicus Brief” contending, “It is well established that a political party has the right to determine the eligibility of its own nominees.”

In July 2013, Chapman gave notice she would resign her post within 30 days, after which the new secretary of state, James R. Bennett, was named the defendant in the case.

One year after acquiring McInnish, the Alabama Supreme Court opined the secretary of state does not have the authority “to regulate the conduct of a presidential election after the President-elect has been selected.”

Other Courts Have Ruled Differently

Not long before McInnish made its way to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2013, Colorado plaintiff and would-be presidential candidate Abdul Karim Hassan appealed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals a case filed against the State of Colorado and then-Secretary of State Scott Gessler for denying him a place on the 2012 ballot stemming from their determination that he was constitutionally ineligible due to his foreign birth.

In an opinion expressing the conclusion of a three-judge panel, then-Judge Neil Gorsuch wrote that “a state’s legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally
prohibited from assuming office.”

In 1968, then-California Secretary of State Frank M. Jordan disqualified Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the Peace and Freedom Party, from the presidential ballot because at age 33, he did not meet the Article II requirement of 35 years of age and would not have met it on Inauguration Day. The U.S. Supreme Court would later reject Cleaver’s petition for a Writ of Certiorari.

In December 2023, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold contended 45th president Donald J. Trump was ineligible to have his name placed on the 2024 ballot due to her determination that he was guilty of “insurrection,” which Section 3 of the 14th Amendment cites as justification for state- and federal-level public servants to be banned from further service.

A contemporaneous Newsweek article cites several examples of presidential candidates’ vetting by state officials leading to disqualification, comparing Trump’s Colorado case to that of Cleaver, 31-year-old Linda Jenness and more recently, Roger Calero, who was born in Nicaragua.

Some states, such as Connecticut and Delaware, did not exclude Calero from their ballots.

Touching on the “natural born Citizen” requirement in the Trump case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on March 4 that “Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the states, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse” (the opinion of the Colorado Supreme Court).

Harris and Haley

Harris’s birth circumstance is similar to that of former 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, whose parents were presumably in the U.S. legally but were not naturalized U.S. citizens at the time of their daughter’s birth in Bamberg, South Carolina.

On January 1, 2024, legal scholar Paul Ingrassia wrote, in part:

Harris’s Eligibility Questioned in 2017

Resembling that which occurred a decade earlier with Obama, in early December 2017, when Harris was serving as a U.S. senator from California and was rumored to be considering a 2020 presidential campaign, constituent Gary Wilmott called upon her in a letter to “take a serious look at Article II of the U.S. Constitution, i.e., the presidential eligibility clause.”

Wilmott wrote:

Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 mandates that a president be a NATURAL-born citizen, which you clearly are not. At the time of your birth, BOTH of your parents were citizens of foreign countries, so your birth in California makes you at best a NATIVE-born citizen (anchor baby?) under the prevailing view of the 14th Amendment. Lest you think that I have Republican bias I would also point out that presidential wannabes Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio also fail to meet this higher standard of citizenship. Their campaigns were fraudulent and in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Wilmott’s conclusion was derived from the fact that although born in Oakland, CA in 1964, there was no evidence Harris’s parents were naturalized U.S. citizens when she was born. Harris’s office declined to respond to Wilmott’s question on the matter; a follow-up inquiry from The Post & Email also received no response.

After considerable research, “@Kancel Kamala” discovered no evidence Harris’s mother, who passed away in 2009, ever naturalized, and that she could have been deported in 1968. Conversely, on his Stanford University webpage, Harris’s father, Donald Jasper Harris, claims he naturalized but does not state the year.

Reader Robert C. Laity, however, obtained what he described as “certified” documentation demonstrating that Donald Harris did, in fact, naturalize in September 1981; a second source affirmed it to The Post & Email.

Laity’s legal challenge to Harris’s eligibility was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court after being ignored by Justice Department officials and later refused a hearing by lower courts beginning in New York State.

Obama, Biden and Harris

Despite the doubts and numerous legal challenges to Obama’s eligibility as well as the findings of the Posse’s investigation, he served two terms in the White House.

In speaking last year to comedian Stephen Colbert about a hypothetical “third term,” which is prohibited by the 22nd Amendment, Obama indicated he would “be fine with” being “in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and then I could sort of deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony.”

Indeed, Obama is often mentioned as a likely driving force behind the Biden-Harris White House and more recently, instrumental in ultimately convincing Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race on July 21.

Looking back, however, in August of last year NBC News reported, “During a trip to the White House in June, former President Barack Obama made it clear to his former running mate that he was committed to doing whatever it takes to support his re-election,” citing “three sources familiar with the meeting.”

According to Trump during a speech at a Turning Point USA event Friday night, Biden was “threatened with the 25th Amendment” if he continued to refuse to withdraw from the campaign. “I know as many people on that side as our side,” he said.

Ratified in 1965 following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the amendment outlines the “procedures for replacing the president or vice president in the event of death, removal, resignation, or incapacitation.”

Will Harris Be Nominated?

The 2024 Democrat National Convention will be held next month in Chicago, with Harris now seeking the presidential nomination in Biden’s place. As of Tuesday, Harris reportedly received the support of a sufficient number of delegates to obtain the nomination.

As of Thursday, the DNC website continued to show a Biden/Harris ticket.

On Friday, the website reflected the changed political landscape:

Obama Endorses Harris

In a highly televised telephone call Friday following a four-day delay, Barack Obama and wife Michelle endorsed Harris for president.