Breaking: Utah Supreme Court Rules in Favor of E-signatures

We're going to take a wild guess that Lt. Governor Bell and Attorney General Mark Shurtleff will soon be eating crow in the UEG Petition matter

The Deseret News delivers what's likely to be "hot off the press" good news for proponents of theUtahns for Ethical Government (UEG) Citizen's Initiative Petition, with the following story which reports that the Utah Supreme Court issued a decision this morning declaring "electronic signatures valid for candidate petitions":

• Utah Supreme Court rules in favor of e-signatures

Although this morning's story refers only to "candidate petitions," it's likely that that this decision will also benefit the UEG group's ongoing citizens initiative petition signature gathering effort, inasmuch as the Court has apparently ruled that Utah Lt. Governor Bell "overstepped his bounds as the state's chief election officer," in rejecting Appellant Anderson's "so-called e-signatures" on the basis of Lt. Governor Bell's argument that "Utah's elections operate on a "paper-based system."

Inasmuch as that's the same basic argument Lt. Governor Bell has used in support of his rejection of the 10,000 or so already-submitted UEG ethics reform petitions, we're going to take a wild guess that Lt. Governor Bell and Attorney General Mark Shurtleff will soon be eating crow in the UEG Petition matter, that the Court's decision will be interpreted broadly to include citizens initiative petitions, and that the UEG group will soon be moving forward to bolster it's paper-based signature gathering effort with a renewed online effort to finally gather the requisite 95,000 signatures necessary to place robust ethics reform on the ballot for the 2012 election.

We'll definitely keep you posted on this as the situation develops, but for now we'll speculate that there'll soon be some fine dining in the Utah Government Executive Branch Offices up there on Capitol Hill:

Justice Served... Yum!

So what say our gentle readers about all this?

Update 6/22/10 4:26 p.m.: The Utah Supreme Court now has today's written decision posted to its website. Click the link below to read the raw legalese:

• Anderson v. Lt. Gov. Bell

Although we haven't had the time to fully digest this opinion, after our admittedly superficial first reading, it's obvious that the Utah High Court relied fairly heavily in its decision upon the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, which broadly allows electronic signatures in most "transactions," except in those instances where the legislature has specifically banned such transactions.

Update 6/23/10 9:24 a.m.: The Standard-Examiner carries its own version of this story this morning, which includes encouraging excerpts from an interview with UEG lawyer David Irvine, who indicates that the UEG group will "put that Internet petition option back on [their] website as quickly as [they] logistically can.":

• Group to revive online petition / Utahns for Ethical Government to seek signatures

Significantly, UEG lawyers are optimistic that the Utah High Court's decision is broad enough to support a renewed UEG online drive:

...the state's lawyers' arguments against Anderson's appeal "are the same arguments they have put forward against validating our online initiative signatures," Irvine said. "And the court very clearly found no merit in their reasoning."

When the UEG online petition feature is re-enabled, we assure you that our gentle readers will be the first to know.