John G. Matsusaka is the Charles F. Sexton Chair in American Enterprise in the Marshall School of Business, Gould School
of Law, and Department of Political
Science
at the University of Southern California, and
President of the Initiative and
Referendum Institute at USC.
Asked for
a comment about the campaign by the Coalition for an E-Initiative to allow eligible Californians to sign official initiative and related
petitions online, he today issued this statement to Etopia News:
"The right of the people to petition the government
goes back to the founding of the Republic and the right of the people to
propose new laws by initiative goes back more than a century in California and
other states. In the 21st Century, when a vast amount of communication and
business takes place online, it only makes sense to take advantage of
contemporary technology to allow citizens to exercise their petition rights
electronically."
The
Coaltion for an E-Initiative (CFEI), launched as a Facebook page on February
15, 2013, is working to legalize online signature-gathering, also known as
e-signatures or “Smart Initiatives,” in California and half-a-dozen other
western states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington State)
that already allow their citizens to register online to vote and have the
initiative process but do not yet allow online signature gathering on official
initiative and related petitions.
The CFEI
is the brainchild of Marc Strassman, partner in the private equity firm Green
Asset Finance, and a long-time champion of digital democracy.
He is, for
example, the author of the turn-of-the-century non-fiction volume “Etopian
Elections: Internet Voting, Smart
Initiatives, and the Future of (Electronic) Democracy, available online at:
You can
see and hear him talking about Smart Initiatives in 1999 at IBM’s Institute for
Electronic Government, at:
You can
hear his 2002 cyber-democracy plan for the never-realized “Valley City” (Los
Angeles secession campaign) at:
You can
catch his virtual address to the 2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy
at:
For a
video panel discussion he produced and hosted about “"Electoral
Evolution Beyond Online Voter Registration" with election officials from
Arizona, Utah, and Washington State, recorded on October 9, 2012, on Etopia News,
using Google+ Hangouts On Air, go to:
He urges
all those who support a citizen’s right to use the Internet to sign official
initiative and related petitions online to visit the Coalition for an
E-Initiative Facebook page at:
“like” the
page and leave your own comments on the issue of e-signatures on official
initiative petitions.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: This
article was written by Marc Strassman, reporter at, and publisher of, Etopia News.)
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