Starting today, Idahoans for the first time will be able to sign a ballot initiative petition online.
Last month, after the state refused to choose either putting Reclaim Idaho’s initiative on the November ballot, or allowing for online signature gathering, federal district court Judge Lynn Winmill chose the latter.
The state is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the decision while it appeals.
But for now, the campaign is going ahead. Reclaim Idaho’s executive director Rebecca Schroeder said registered voters will be able to use DocuSign to mark the petition entirely online starting Monday.
“[DocuSign is] used for legal transactions of all sorts, real estate, million-dollar deals,” Schroeder said.
The petition will be available at Reclaim Idaho’s website. Voters will have to confirm their identity by entering the last four digits of their Social Security number.
That data is stored with Reclaim Idaho, but will be available to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office if it wants to validate the authenticity of the signatures beyond the verification done by county clerks’ offices.
Reclaim Idaho’s initiative would raise taxes on big businesses and the wealthy to boost education funding – something Schroeder said is critical as public schools are set to take a 5% hit to their budgets.
“We were already at the bottom of the funding barrel and these cuts are going to hurt,” she said.
Idaho recently ranked dead last – again – in per-pupil spending for K-12 education across the country, according to a new survey by the National Education Association. As Idaho Education News reports, it’s nothing new, as the state has repeatedly earned such low marks for years.
Reclaim Idaho will have 48 days to gather the rest of the roughly 55,000 signatures it needs to get on the November ballot.
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