Starting in 2008, WorldNetDaily heavily promoted a petition “demanding that the constitutional eligibility requirement be taken seriously and that any and all controlling legal authorities in this matter examine the complete birth certificate of Barack Obama, including the actual city and hospital of birth, and make that document available to the American people for inspection.” But as we documented, the petition itself lacked the transparency WND was demanding from Obama, with no independent way to verify the number of signatures WND claimed or any apparent mechanism to weed out fake names. Indeed, as one enterprising blogger discovered, it was all too easy to inflate the number of signatures by signing up under multiple names and a fake email address — 216 at last count.
Now, WND is back at it again, with a new petition demanding that “the 112th Congress immediately undertake a full and impartial investigation into the constitutional eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama to serve as president of the United States.” And once again, WND is promoting the heck out of it, with the most recent article touting how the petition “is nearing 40,000 names.”
Alas, WND is once again refusing to be transparent about the process, providing no mechanism for independently checking the veracity and number of signatures — an ironic bit of obfuscation in a petition demanding transparency. This means WND’s new petition will be as open to fraud as the old one.
Why, it’s almost as if WND is cynically creating these petitions to build up its mailing list or something — after all, an email address is one of the required entry fields on the petition.