Encouraging Cathy McKitrick story in this morning's Salt Lake Tribune, reporting that sponsors of the various citizen initiatives which are percolating through the State of Utah are embracing applicable provisions of Utah law, which permit use of electronic signatures for online "transactions, " and are putting their their government reform petitions online. According to this morning's story, the following two petitions are already uploaded and ready for your signatures:
• Fair Boundaries Redistricting Initiative
• Peoples Right Anti-bribery & Anticorruption Initiatives
This morning's story also reports that the folks from the Utahns For Ethical Government (UEG) are not far behind, and that they'll have their own broad ethics reform petition ready for your online signatures imminently:
• UEG Ethics Reform InitiativeWe'll of course keep a close eye on developments, and let you know as soon as the latter petition is up and running online.
We applaud these citizen activist groups for entering the electronic age, and making these online resources available to the broad range of citizens who regularly use the internet. In that connection, we urge our readers to navigate to the above two sites, to affix your signatures.
As we've already reported, Utah legislative leadership is working in the back rooms on Capitol Hill to put together their own "ethics reform package(s)." Whether this will result in a genuine attempt to enact robust ethics reform, or result in a mere "an empty vessel" we do not know. One thing we do know however... legislative leadership will be a lot more inclined to treat ethics reform seriously this year... if there are several certifiable petitions ready for the ballot this coming November. We accordingly urge our readers to keep our Utah legislature's feet to the fire on this, by signing the various online citizen petitions. According to the most recent polling, the vast majority of Utahns continue to strongly favor broad state government ethics and campaign reform. Sign the petitions, folks. Let's not be hoodwinked by our legislature this go-round.
For the benefit of our WCF readers we'll also note that we've placed a new module, "Active Citizen Petitions," (which includes the three above-mentioned petitions) at the top of our right sidebar. And in the interest of making all active citizen petitions easily available to our readers, we've also added these other active citizen petitions within this new module:
• Powder Mountain Disincorporation PetitionHave at it, O Gentle Ones!
• Ogden Streetcar Petition
