Birth Registration Quotes

In the widest sense of the word, to name is to interpret experience by the past, to translate it into terms of memory, to bind the unknown into the system of the known. Civilized man knows of hardly any other way of understanding things. Everybody, everything, has to have its label, its number, certificate, registration, classification. What is not classified is irregular, unpredictable, and dangerous. Without passport, birth certificate, or membership in some nation, one’s existence is not recognized.

Anti-voting lawmakers perhaps weren’t intending to make it harder for married white women to vote, but that’s exactly what they did by requiring an exact name match across all forms of identification in many states in recent years. Birth certificates list people’s original surnames, but if they change their names upon marriage, their more recent forms of ID usually show their married names. Sandra Watts is a married white judge in the state of Texas who was forced to use a provisional ballot in 2013 under the state’s voter ID law. She was outraged at the imposition: “Why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last forty-nine years?” Like many women, she included her maiden name as her middle name when she took her husband’s last name—and that’s what her driver’s license showed. But on the voter rolls, her middle name was the one her parents gave her at birth, which she no longer used. And like that, she lost her vote—all because of a law intended to suppress people like Judge Watts’s fellow Texan Anthony Settles, a Black septuagenarian and retired engineer. Anthony Settles was in possession of his Social Security card, an expired Texas identification card, and his old University of Houston student ID, but he couldn’t get a new photo ID to vote in 2016 because his mother had changed his name when she remarried in 1964. Several lawyers tried to help him track down the name-change certificate in courthouses, to no avail; his only recourse was to go to court for a new one, at a cost of $250. Elderly, rural, and low-income voters are more likely not to have birth certificates or to have documents containing clerical errors. Hargie Randell, a legally blind Black Texan who couldn’t drive but who had a current voter registration card used before the new Texas law, had to arrange for people to drive him to the Department of Public Safety office three times, and once to the county clerk’s office an hour away, only to end up with a birth certificate that spelled his name wrong by one letter.

We can now see how the expansion of blockspace is on track to give us a cryptographically verifiable macrohistory, or cryptohistory for short. This is the log of everything that billions of people choose to make public: every decentralized tweet, every public donation, every birth and death certificate, every marriage and citizenship record, every crypto domain registration, every merger and acquisition of an on-chain entity, every financial statement, every public record — all digitally signed, timestamped, and hashed in freely available public ledgers.26 The thing is, essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and every step with a Fitbit — all of that produces digital artifacts. So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community.25 That’s the future of public records, a concept that is to the paper-based system of the legacy state what paper records were to oral records.

The superintendent of the new consolidated school, Emory Huyck, had been recommended for the job by his alma mater, Michigan State Agricultural College.1 He was born in 1894 in Butternut, Michigan, not far from Carson City, one of eleven children, all of whom would outlive him, as would both his parents, William and Mary. After graduating from high school at the top of his class, Emory briefly attended the Ferris Institute in Big Rapids, Michigan. Ferris had been founded in 1884 by future Michigan governor and US senator Woodbridge Nathan Ferris as an “industrial school” meant to provide both practical training and a basic liberal arts education “to all young men and women, regardless of their ages, regardless of their mental attainments, regardless of their present conditions, who desire to make themselves stronger and better.”2 In 1917, while teaching at a school in the Montcalm County village of Pierson, Emory registered for the draft. His registration card suggests that he was not merely willing but was keen to serve his country. To the question “Do you claim exemption from draft?” he answered with an emphatic “I do not,” rather than a simple “no,” as most young men did.3 Stationed at Camp Custer near Battle Creek during the war years, he served as a training officer. He would eventually be commissioned second lieutenant of cavalry in the Officers’ Reserve Corps.4