A California technology billionaire said on Thursday that his longtime and perhaps quixotic effort to partition the Golden State into multiple new states could soon be put before voters.
Venture capitalist Tim Draper said he had gathered about 600,000 signatures on a petition to put his proposal to divide California on the November ballot, more than the 366,000 needed to qualify. It is his third attempt to get voters to weigh in on his call to break up the most populous U.S. state.
Draper, who in 2014 and 2016 failed in his efforts to win approval for a ballot initiative to divide the state into six parts, said in a news release Thursday that he planned to file the signatures with election officials next week.
[...] To go into effect, California would first have to certify the signatures that Draper has gathered, and then voters in November would need to pass the measure. After that, the U.S. Congress would have to approve it.
Also at The Mercury News and SFGate.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by ilPapa on Saturday April 14 2018, @01:28AM (3 children)
There are 40 million Californians. He claims to have 600,000 signatures.
You do the math. Does that indicate enough appetite for this proposition to pass? Especially in a year where people from coast to coast are seemingly saying (with their votes) that they've had just about enough of these right-wing jackoffs. I don't think so. Not that I'm opposed to there being now 4 Democratic senators from California, but even people I know in Fresno and Bakersfield don't want this. The last thing they need is to go from living in the most prosperous state in the US to one of the poorest, which is what they'd be.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 14 2018, @02:14AM (2 children)
How many miilions of signatures do they need to collect for you to be impressed? There will always be an order of magnitude less signatures than votes.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Saturday April 14 2018, @05:57AM
They've gotten enough signatures to get on the ballot before. And the proposition was crushed.
Signing a petition is one thing, but voting is another.
As I said, Californians do not have any appetite to actually split up the state. It's just a scam.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Sunday April 15 2018, @05:17AM
By the way, the last time Draper pulled this grift, he got something like 1.5 million signatures. Of course, most of them were bogus and fell off in the challenge, but the fact that he's only presenting 600k this time around is an indication of just how badly his hustle is failing.
Oh, and the last time, his master plan was to divide California into SIX states.
As I've said, grifters gonna grift.
You are still welcome on my lawn.