Signing Petitions Online Should Be Acceptable Practice
Backers of initiative petitions are pushing Utah election officials to recognize electronic voter signatures gathered over the Internet. There’s no good reason why e-signatures should not be honored.
After all, you can buy licenses and pay fees to state government over the Internet, register your car, file your tax returns. If security for e-commerce transactions with the state is good enough to protect people’s bank accounts and identity from hackers, it should be good enough to prevent fraud when someone files an electronic signature on a petition.
Being able to sign petitions online is a great convenience for voters. There are thousands of citizens anxious to sign the two initiatives and it is difficult for them to find someone with a petition to sign. The efficiency factor goes up a hundredfold with online access to the petition.
Expect the legislature to fight it, as they have all attempts at ethics reform. They don’t want anyone messing with the gravy train they’ve got right now—like being able to pocket all their campaign donations and spend on any personal items of their choice. Like being able to accept $25,000 bribes and call them donations.
They will fight e-signatures—but they will lose. This time ethics reform is going to take place because it is in the hands of the voters instead of the legislators.
The creators of the I-Sign Web site to gather petition signatures argue persuasively that an encrypted system employing a registered voter’s name, address, birth date and the last four digits of the signer’s driver license will not only be secure but should be easier for county clerks to verify than conventional paper signatures.
The state’s Uniform Electronic Transactions Act anticipates this situation. It provides that the words “sign” or “signature” in a state law “may include any form of electronic signature authorized by the governmental agency” so long as this implementation is not “inconsistent with the manifest intent of the Legislature” or “repugnant to the context of the statute.”
Those phrases about legislative intent and context are the stuff lawyers are paid to argue. It might be tough to convince a court that the Legislature intended to make the signature-gathering process for petitions as simple as putting up a secure Web site. The language of the statutes on initiatives is full of nit-picky requirements that make it hard to gather signatures the old-fashioned way. The Legislature has labored mightily over the years to create ever-higher procedural barriers to lawmaking by citizen initiative.
But the Utah Constitution places the power of the people to make laws through initiatives on an equal plane with the power of the Legislature, an inconvenient truth that legislators often ignore.
And who is to say that a registered voter is going to spend less time studying a petition she sees on a Web site than when a human signature-gatherer thrusts a clipboard into her hands in a supermarket parking lot? On the Web, someone can take all the time in the world before signing. Or not.
The point is that the Web’s power to extend the arms of democratic action is limitless. That’s why legislators may not like it, but the people should embrace it. And if they are true to the spirit of the constitution they are sworn to serve, election officials will embrace it, too.