May 12, 2010, Hawaii: Governor Linda Lingle singed into law the so-called "Birther Bill" that is intended to limit the number of requests for President Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate.

The new law, Act 100, allows state agencies a limited exemption from Freedom of Information requirements when duplicative requests for information are made by the same person.  It provides:

[E]ach agency upon request by any person shall make government records available for inspection and copying during regular business hours; provided that an agency shall not be required to make government records available or respond to a person's subsequent duplicative request, if: (1)  After conducting a good faith review and comparison of the earlier request and the pending request, the agency finds that the pending request is duplicative or substantially similar in nature. (2)  The pending request has already been responded to within the past year; and (3)  The agency's response to the pending request would remain unchanged.

  
In hearings on the Birther Bill, Hawaii's Director of health, testified  that:
For more than a year, the Department of Health has continued to receive approximately 50 e-mail inquiries a month seeking access to President Barack Obama's birth certificate in spite of the fact that President Obama has posted a copy of the certificate on his former campaign website. . . . We have been able to identify about four to six individuals who engage in a pattern of repeated requests. The time and state resources it takes to respond to these often convoluted inquiries are considerable. The responses ultimately have required the time and involvement of the Attorney General's office and the Office of Information Practices. We believe having to respond repeatedly to essentially the same request or a variation of the request all centering on whether or not President Obama was born in Hawaii is a frivolous use of department time and resources, particularly since the outcome will not change no matter how many times we respond to these requests.

The Hawaii's Birther Bill allegedly suppresses information in order to gag "public polluters:" individuals and entities that burden the administration with frivolous requests for information.