Summer Column: It's Time To Permit Voters To Sign Initiative Petitions On the Internet

After a busy spring and summer, signature gathering across the country is finally reaching its 2008 conclusion. The final deadlines for turning in signatures for November ballot initiatives are this week in three states: Colorado (August 4), North Dakota (August 5), and Ohio (August 6). Deadlines in all the other states have already passed. So  I'm heading to a small town in rural Wisconsin (your blogger's Cheesehead in-laws have a bug-infested family cottage on a lake) for a week to catch up on sleep (you may have noticed a few more mental hiccups than usual on the blog lately) and do some writing. I plan to stay away from email and the Internet until Aug. 11. But before I go, I wanted to advance an idea: permitting voters to sign initiative petitions on-line.

In some states, there's already limited circulation by Internet. If a petition is formatted right, it can be emailed to voters, who print it out, sign it and send it in. That's fine, but I'd like to go further, permitting voters to add their names to ballot initiative petitions as they now do to other on-line petitions. For security's sake, the voters would have to provide more than just their real name. They'd have to give an address, an email, and a phone number that matches the number on their voter registration--a phone number where they could be reached to verify that their signature is authentic. 

Opening up signature gathering in this way would address several of the major criticisms of direct democracy in general and the ballot initiative process in particular. Let's go through them one by one.

CRITICISM 1. That the ballot process is dominated by wealthy special interests. That's largely true--because of the costs involved in signature gathering. In California, for example, it now takes at least $2 million to qualify a measure. But Internet signatures would permit grass roots groups to circulate petitions at a much lower cost.

2. That paid signature gatherers dominate direct democracy. That's also true. In fact, because of the logistical difficulties in fielding volunteer petition gatherers, it's actually cheaper to hire paid gatherers than to use volunteers. Most "reforms" targeting signature gatherers would make signature gathering more costly and complicated -- thus INCREASING the need for paid petition circulators. Allowing petitions to circulate easily on the Internet would be one of the few ways to make paid gatherers less central to the process.

3. That signature deadlines are too short. The Internet signature gathering would be faster and make ridiculously short timelines like the one in Oklahoma, which permits only 90 days to get the signatures, more reasonable.

4. That blocking campaigns have become too aggressive. This is a conservative complaint that is getting more attention, though I tend to discount it. (Blocking campaigns have long been common practice in direct democracy, and I've yet to see a campaign that was truly effective in stopping signature gathering. The real problem is the short deadlines in some states and the attempts to use the law and, in Oklahoma's case, law enforcement to shut down campaigns that the political class opposes). On the Internet, however, blocking campaigns -- which usually consist of sending out goons of some sort to harass signature gatherers and those they approach -- shouldn't be a factor.

The obvious objection to permitting Internet signatures is security. In an era of conspiracy theories about electronic voting (and real concern about the records and tactics of companies such as Diebold), security concerns must be taken into account. That's why state officials (and local officials in the case of local ballot measures) must receive enough personal data from the Internet signers to verify that they've signed.

But remember, the system being replaced is not a particularly secure one. In most states, including California, the overwhelming majority of signatures are never checked. Instead, random sampling is done to check the signatures and addresses against registration records. Voters who sign the petitions are not contacted. The Internet signature regime I'm proposing would require more checking than we currently have -- likely at some added costs to states.

Some politicians and opponents of direct democracy might object that Internet signatures thus require an indirect state subsidy. That may well be true. My view: it's a small price to pay for promoting a more open, grass roots, democratic system of direct democracy. And if there are still objections to the added costs of verification, why not charge a higher filing fee to initiative sponsors to cover the cost? California's current fee for filing -- $200 -- doesn't begin to match the cost to the attorney general's office of reviewing the measure, writing a title and summary, and then defending it in court.

Who else might object to Internet signatures? The signature gathering companies, naturally. But I think they'd still get business, particularly in cases in which time is short and an initiative needs a number of signatures fast. I also think such companies, many of which have developed their own databases and software for verifying signatures, would find that they could sell their verification work to initiative sponsors and perhaps even states and municipalities. With petitions circulating on the Internet, there would be more measures out there -- and that higher volume would mean more business.

Well, there's my idea. Please discuss and post. I'll write more when I'm back on the grid.