Now
circulating, the “California Initiative, Referendum and Recall Reform Act of2016” (CIRRRA2016), of which Mr. Liddell is chief proponent, would require Secretary of State Alex
Padilla to create, within 180 days of the law going into effect, a system
whereby registered California voters (who can now register online to vote here) would be able to legally “affix” the digitized version of their signature on
file at the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to official and
online initiative, referendum, and recall petitions, to be made available to
all on the Secretary of State’s website.
It
currently is very expensive to qualify a ballot initiative, referendum, or
recall petition, since it typically involves hiring and paying a team of paid
circulators. Owners of the stores where
circulators work usually don’t like having their customers subject to the
attention of the circulators. People are
busy when they are out shopping and don’t have the time or bandwidth to
seriously consider the merits of a proposed ballot measure.
All these
problems go away when voters can consider proposed ballot measures on their own
timetable online, where they can read supporting and opposing arguments about
the proposals and make up their minds thoughtfully as to whether or not they
want to add their signature to a particular petition.
On the
other side of the transaction, county election officials, responsible for
processing a growing flood of paper-and-ink petitions, are being swamped and
stressed for funds to keep up with the increased use of these processes of
direct democracy. Creating an
electronic, online option for signing official initiative, referendum, and
recall petitions would save the counties time and money, be more convenient for
citizens, and reduce the need for fraught in-person petition signature
solicitation in public places.
They would
also allow for the direct verification of each and every signature submitted,
going beyond the random sampling and extrapolation that is now standard
procedure in county election offices.
Even with
the legalization of online signature-gathering, it will still require the
signatures of 5% of the voters in the last gubernatorial election (365,880
right now) to qualify a statewide ballot initiative measure, and it will still
require the support of a majority of those voting on it in a public election
before it comes law.
But
legalizing online signature gathering would do much to restore the grass-roots
orientation of these processes of direct democracy. Proposition 7 created, in 1911, the modern California initiative and referendum. A century later, it deserves to be modernized with the best digital tools available, and that means legalizing online signature-gathering.
Let us
leave for a later time a discussion of the impact this reform will have on
politics in the Golden State. But some objections to making that transition are already apparent.
Elected
officials may not like it if their constituents can organize an online recall
campaign against them at any time. I
suppose this will make them even more attentive than they already are to the policy
preferences and administrative needs of their constituents. This sounds like an improvement to me.
Elected
officials may not like it that hundreds of thousands of ordinary, civilian,
registered voters will be able to exercise some of the same legislative sway mediated
by electronics that they currently enjoy themselves, when they use smartphone apps
and online websites to make their policy preferences known and recognized, just as the electeds get to vote electronically in floor sessions in their legislative chambers. That sounds like an improvement to me.
Election
officials, on the other hand, may like it that they can replace (or augment) their current methods
by transitioning from pen-and-paper to a cloud-based automated system that
immediately validates the status of each signature submitted. That sounds like an improvement to me, too.
Let’s give
it a try.
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