Recently, the North Carolina State Board of Elections told an independent candidate that he may help complete his petition with electronic signatures. Omar Beasley, a candidate for Durham County Commissioner, needed 7,437 valid signatures by June to get on the ballot this year. He succeeded, and some of his signatures came from using Echosign.com, which is a service mostly used for business contracts.
Beasley is running for an at-large seat. Five seats are up. His only opponents will be the five Democratic Party nominees. See this story about the campaign. Oddly, the story doesn’t mention Beasley’s precedent-breaking use of electronic petitioning. Thanks to Sean Haugh for this news.
How many FELON criminals, domestic and foreign, are hacking into Echosign stuff ???
If we are forced to have to live with these draconian petition gathering procedures for obtaining ballot position for independent and 3rd party candidates, then allowing the electronic signature procedure would make the tasks more obtainable. Perhaps instead of begging legislatures to lower the petition numbers, we ought to engage now at convincing them to allow electronically gathered signatures to also count. Now that one election official’s office has set precedence for such, would this now help others who may go to court demanding that they also be allowed to gather signatures by this manner?
I’m on board with e-petition signatures. Still I think all candidates should qualify with the same number of signatures during every election, something Demo Rep’s been saying for ages. Not a ridiculously big amount of signatures but also not a petty number of signatures.
Only power hungry “top one” IRV-likers/three party system advocates will spend time fighting top two.
Tired of chasing your tail? Try top 1000*, where 1000 names are elected in consecutive order with 1/1001ths (.999%) plus one vote each, for a total guaranteed satisfaction level of 99.9% plus 1000 votes.
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*Expanding from “top 100? to “top 1000? in 2012, thanks to the Queen, Hon Prime Minister Roseanne Barr [Green Tea].
*Expanding from “top 100” to “top 1000” in 2012, thanks to the Queen, Hon Prime Minister Roseanne Barr [Green Tea].