The Smart Initiatives Prospectus

The Internet makes possible, but hardly guarantees, a significant increase in freedom and self-determination, for those who care about such things.  Giving actions taken over the Internet the force of law while giving every citizen adequate access to the Internet makes it possible to re-form democracy on a basis that is both intimate and national, even global. 

Approximately half the states have in place the initiative process, whereby citizens or groups can propose laws that the state legislature sees fit, for whatever reason, not to pass.  But it is difficult and expensive to qualify an initiative for the ballot.  In California, it takes at least one million dollars to pay a professional signature gathering company to collect the 420,260 signatures necessary to qualify a ballot initiative.

This means that only either very motivated grass-roots organizations or people or groups with a lot of money can avail themselves of this procedure.

But if it were legal to sign initiative petitions right online, using digital certificates, then a good idea might be enough to propel an initiative onto the ballot.  A replica of the official petition form, instead of being presented to harried pedestrians in malls where the owners have done everything they can to exclude signature gatherers and where they continue to object to the presence of citizens who might distract consumers, could be posted on a web site, surrounded by materials explaining the measure and exhorting citizens to sign it.

With this kind of privatization of public space, it is increasingly hard to find places where signatures can be gathered on petitions.  Many state legislatures, jealous of citizens making laws they won't, worried that the Internet will disintermediate them the way it's rendered obsolete so many other twentieth century institutions, have tried to limit citizens' rights to collect signatures in public, while simultaneously ignoring calls to put the Internet to work in ways that would circumvent all the real-world obstacles to signature gathering.

Now comes the Smart Initiatives movement, seeking to add petition signing to the growing number of processes that are now being done faster, cheaper, and more conveniently over the Net.  The Smart Initiatives Initiative, now pending in the Attorney General of California's office, would let initiative proponents put their measures into proper graphic form, then post them on the Net, where those who so chose could use a digital certificate issued by the state to digitally "sign" it.

No paper, no pen, no interfering with the property rights of mall owners or the United States Post Office.  No heat, rain, cold, or table-carrying for petition circulators.  No need to reduce the content of the initiative to a short slogan, since having it online along with explanatory and exhortory materials will mean prospective signers can examine the legislation's text and its supporters arguments at their leisure, 24/7.

And initiative sites can also include chat rooms for discussion of the initiative, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), links to related sites, audio and video clips discussing the measure, live webcasts (audio or video) of presentations on the initiative or debates between proponents and opponents, and so on, all of which would be difficult or impossible to bring to a mall and all of which would enhance the democratic process in general and the public understanding of every specific initiative in particular.

From the point of view of the election officials who need to sign off on the validity of the hundreds of thousands of signatures required to qualify a ballot measure, letting them be signed online with digital signatures ought to be seen as a dream come true.  Currently, the paper-and-ink petitions submitted by initiative supports in one batch on the latest possible day allowed are not really checked very thoroughly.  A small percentage of the signatures is checked, by hand, against the voter registration cards, and the results of this "random sample" are extrapolated to determine if enough valid signatures have been gathered.

But with digitally-signed petitions, the computers automatically, and almost instantaneously, authenticate the digital signatures.  This means that EVERY signature can be checked and authenticated, or rejected as inauthentic.  It means that the checking process has been automated, needing people only to program and maintain the machines that do the authenticating.

If phone calls were still handled by operators, if checks were cleared by back-room workers, these processes would be as slow and as expensive as checking signatures on initiative petitions is today.  The guardians of this process will tell us that initiative petitions are different, are sacred, that error is not an option and that the old ways are best.

These are self-serving arguments and they are not adequate responses to the self-evident superiority of computerized methods, which are, in fact, already used throughout the election system, but haven't been applied to the signature gathering process because to do so would mean a quantum increase in the ability of ordinary citizens to legislate on their own behalf, something that those with a monopoly of this power don't want to share.

There are legitimate worries about certain aspects of proposed remote Internet voting technologies, principally regarding the difficulty in simultaneously authenticating the identity of an online voter while anonymizing the content of their ballot.

But using the Internet to collect digitally-signed initiative (or referendum or recall) petitions does not have the problem of simultaneous authentication and anonymization.  When a person now signs a paper petition, their name obviously and necessarily becomes known to the election officials who need to verify the validity of their signature.  Unlike an election ballot, there is no "content" created by their actions, no secret list of whom they voted for or how they voted on ballot measures.  The only "content" of an initiative is the signer's going on public record saying that they'd like to see that measure put on the ballot for a secret vote, up or down.

So the need to protect the anonymity of the voter isn't present with petition signing.  And if a state currently protects the anonymity of the signer from the general public, as opposed to protecting it from the state, this can be done just as easily, even more easily, if the signatures have been gathered electronically, over the Net.

And as mentioned already, having the signatures in digital form means that every one of them can be checked and authenticated, then declared valid or not, in much less time than it currently takes to laboriously hand-check a small random sample of the submitted signatures.

So the digital signing of initiative petitions is faster, cheaper, and every bit as private as the current paper-and-ink method and allows for a more thorough validation process.  Because it is all these things, it would improve citizen access to the content of initiatives and it would cut the cost of qualifying an initiative by several orders of magnitude.

But automating the signature gathering process will not mean that every proposed initiative would automatically qualify for the ballot.  The same number of real people using digital certificates would still need to sign the petition.  But having the Smart Initiative system in place would mean that a good idea that found favor with 420,260 Californians who find their way to that measure's website would qualify for the ballot, even without its supporters needing to raise a million dollars.

Still, this would only be the first step, since a majority of the voting public would still need to vote for the initiative when they encountered it on the ballot.  But, at least in this first phase of the initiative process, putting it on the ballot, ideas and the will of the people could at least begin again to count for more than cash.