Governor Hair Gel hinted at a “vaccine verification” system at the COVID vaccine lottery drawing last week. At an event in San Francisco yesterday, His Hairfulness teased a bit more about what the system might look like:

Late last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state would soon be rolling out a new “vaccine verification system” for private businesses that may be akin to a vaccine passport. During an event in San Francisco on Monday, Newsom clarified that the “system” will essentially just be electronic vaccine cards that individuals can keep on their phones as opposed to carrying around the paper card.

“It’s not a passport, it’s not a requirement, it’s just the ability now to have an electronic version of that paper version, so you’ll hear more about that in the next couple of days,” he said.

A leash, even a so-called digital one, is still a leash; and with no idea who will be on the end of that leash, it can far too easily become a chokehold.

Once you’re in such a system, you can be tracked, you can be required to get boosters, updates, or any other medical necessity that the leash-holders deem fit, and they can demand compliance, because you gave up your freedoms, when you signed on for the passport.

It’s a slippery slope, as my colleague Brandon Morse lays out:

Let’s start with the simple fact that we haven’t discussed who issues these “passports.” Do they come from a doctor? Does that doctor have to have a license to issue these official passports or is his word good enough? Is there an organization that hands these passports out? Is it a private organization? Does it have to have a license that says its passport is official?

No matter how you swing it, at some point, a governing body is going to have to get involved and decide whether or not you’re okay to go do something like getting groceries, medicine, or an overpriced latte. Somewhere on this line, the government is involved in telling me how I can go about my daily life.

In May, almost 1,000 citizens showed up at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting to protest vaccine passports. Over 700 people lined up to speak at the meeting to lodge their dissent. The outcry was so great that the plans for implementation were put on pause.

One of the speakers, a Black woman, compared the vaccine passport to “Freedom papers”, that antebellum Blacks had to use to prove they had a right to freely move about the country between the North and the South.

As I said before,

What is the difference between “freedom papers” and carrying around “proof” to show you have been vaccinated and are not going to infect anyone? Especially since the public and private sector are attempting to attach who is and is not allowed freedoms based on that fact. We already have a black market for fake vaccine passports. Where else will this lead?

This is beyond Orwellian; it’s positively Stalinesque.

But, His Hairfulness hung on to those emergency powers because he loves rockin’ the Stalin vibe. He had no problem dictating who was essential and who was not, shuttering churches, businesses, and schools, while making sure the French Laundry kept his table open, and the entertainment industry thrived. So, he will have no problem dictating who, and who does not, get access, services, and benefits because they have that special digital mark.

Newsom is slow-rolling the actual details of this “vaccine verification system” as though it is something complex. Hawaii and New York have already put a version of this concept in place, so how hard could it be?

But, this is California, and in the land of Silicon Valley tech innovation, our government systems are not known either for their accuracy, competency or efficiency.

Here are some examples:

The Employment Development Department is the poster child of incompetence. In the middle of a global pandemic, when Hair Gel forced people out of work, the department was so overwhelmed by claims that they allowed a company called Deloitte to fulfill a no-bid contract to manage the call center and claims overflow. Not only did they fail to process the claims of everyone who applied, but never even bothered to answer the phone! Californians would sit on hold for hours, waiting for someone to pick up on the other end; then, if they were fortunate enough to have someone actually pick up the call, they’d get disconnected at some point, and have to start over again.

PLEASE just release us from Pending Purgatory! It will be 10 weeks for me on a valid UI claim of which you've already paid 9 weeks! No one ever answers the phone and when they finally do, they hang up! 😩 #CAEDD #PayThePending @GavinNewsom @AsmRichardBloom @tedlieu @AdamSchiff

— Industry Monkey (@IndustryMonkey) June 11, 2021

I have a family member waiting over 20 weeks. @CA_EDD is useless absolute embarrassment.

— Robyn (@robyn5201) June 12, 2021

But that’s not the half of it. There is the $31 billion in fraudulent funds that the EDD paid out to people other the actual citizens who applied for the benefits. Among those who collected funds were one-year-old and 12-year-old children, and convicted felons.

We are more than a year past the start of the COVID lockdowns, and the EDD is still wading through a backlog of pending claims:

Many Californians are still waiting for the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD) to clear their backlog of claims, with the department’s data page showing over 221,000 claims are pending past 21 days as of June 12.

Failure theater, at its finest.

MyTurn is the online appointment system for California citizens to schedule their COVID-19 vaccines. This was supposed to assist in the distribution of the vaccine, to ensure that those who most needed it were first in line. A supposedly equitable way to schedule the shot to ensure that the most vulnerable received early access.

Yeah, no big surprise that it didn’t work that way. You had the well-heeled and the very young jumping the line, while grandma, grandpa, and those with comorbidities couldn’t even get online to schedule an appointment.

You see, the website was down more than it was up, or it would kick people out in the middle of them scheduling an appointment. Then, after an appointment was scheduled, it could mysteriously be canceled for no apparent reason. In terms of the Pfizer and Moderna shots, if a person was lucky enough to be able to schedule their first shot, when they attempted to schedule the second one, the system blocked their access.

Technology at its finest. Even the U.K. noticed that California had some problems.

From the Guardian:

Since its launch in January, the system has struggled with glitches. The website often crashes, sometimes doesn’t show any appointments at all, lists appointments that do not actually exist, or at times allows users to sign up for a first vaccine dose but not for the second.

In addition to those technological hurdles, experts say My Turn’s more systemic failures represent an amalgam of California’s vaccination challenges. The site has been slow to catch up with the state’s ever-changing eligibility guidelines; it’s one of many systems in a fragmented distribution network; and it isn’t effective at prioritizing those most in need, despite state assurances that equity would drive the vaccination campaign.

California, one again, leading the way.

Motor Voter was the brain child of former Secretary of State, now U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Corrupt Hack), and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-Harridan) where, when you applied for or renewed your driver’s license, you could also register to vote.

What could go wrong? Plenty.

There’s no validation and there’s no known enforcement. It’s all on the honor system.

When people who are permanent legal residents of California, but not citizens, go to the DMV to complete transactions for a driver’s license, state ID card or change of address, the California New Motor Voter system will automatically register them to vote unless they attest that they are not eligible or affirmatively decline to be registered.

How often are non-citizens inadvertently registered to vote in the chaos at the DMV? We don’t know, because nobody validates the data on citizenship.

When the auditors looked at it, they found that six people who voted in the 2018 primary were ineligible persons who were registered to vote at the DMV. Two of them voted in the general election.

The Sacramento Bee reported that these registrations have since been canceled, and nobody’s being charged with a crime.

But the crime is that nobody is verifying eligibility to vote in California.

[…]

It’s on the honor system.

In 2019, after almost three years of implementation, an accounting firm found 83,684 duplicate voter registrations and 171,145 errors on individuals’ political affiliation in the DMV records. Were those ever corrected?

God only knows.

The incompetence of the DMV is legend, no matter the state where you reside. Why would anyone choose to mix voter records, which are under the auspices of the Secretary of State’s office, with motor vehicle information?

Between this and the voting machines we never had a chance.

The Attorney General’s Bureau of Firearms site is another bane. Gun registration is about as useful as a vaccine passport. Anyone who wants to break the law is not going to let a registration or a digital code stop them. Digital codes can be hacked just like guns can be stolen. The beat goes on, as the government limits freedom and punishes law-abiding citizens.

Another crook that leveled up in the Biden administration, former Attorney General Xavier Becerra, came up with the website in order to register so-called “assault weapons”.

From Sacramento Bee, the State’s fish wrap of record:

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office quietly signed a settlement agreement in federal court admitting his agency’s gun-registration website was so poorly designed that potentially thousands of Californians were unable to register their assault weapons and comply with state law.

Under the terms of the settlement filed Wednesday in U.S. Eastern District Court in Sacramento, the state Department of Justice is required to notify each district attorney and law enforcement agency to put on hold “all pending investigations and prosecutions” for those suspected of failing to register their assault weapons.

Interesting that this settlement was filed a day before Becerra was confirmed as the Health and Human Services Secretary. Imagine what Crooked Xavier will do to our healthcare systems.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

And finally, we can’t even do Cannabis Business Distribution correctly! Read my colleague Kira Davis’ deliciously scathing piece about that.

Kira’s kill shot:

“In fact, this state is so overrun with incompetence that we can’t even sell weed properly. Imagine that…in the land of stoners the government somehow managed to even screw up marijuana sales.”

But Governor Hair Gel was all “happy! happy!” at the State Reopening gala at Universal Studios Hollywood. Surrounded by Minions (how appropriate) and a Troll, his Hairfulness played, “Game Show Gavin” with a giant raffle cage where he selected 10 random California residents, who won $1.5 million each.

California is the internet explorer of reopening #CaliforniaReopening pic.twitter.com/s21ag8zeKz

— Harrison Krank (@HarrisonKrank) June 15, 2021

Spending $15 million for the right to use vaccinated people as pawns. This is exactly how it would be with a vaccine passport system. It’s permanent pawnage deceptively packaged in faux safety and special access.

Sound familiar?

His Hairfulness will try, but he’ll ultimately fail. Another guarantee that he’s getting Recalled.