Hi. Our Revolution Boulder just joined Plan Boulder and Rocky Mtn Peace & Justice Ctr in endorsing online petitioning for ballot initiatives. Now 344 of you have signed the petition, which you can easily tell people about with our shortcut Tinyurl.com/Boulderpet. Please help make this Boulder's Pet Project! I discovered that the Boulder County Democrats have online petitioning in their platform already, so we expect their endorsement soon, among others. But we need more... Tuesday 3 of us addressed Boulder City Council to get ready for the August 14th official hearing for putting this and other issues on the ballot. Josh Maynard spoke first and said if Council doesn't put this on the ballot, he would spearhead a petition drive to force it on the ballot: https://youtu.be/1JgrlFFrhL4?t=1495 A bit later Tyler Romero, also a member of the City's Campaign Finance and Elections Working Group that has unanimously recommended online petitioning to Council, spoke, followed immediately by myself: https://youtu.be/1JgrlFFrhL4?t=2076 I presented them with copies of Citizen Power by famed former US Senator Mike Gravel. Here's what I said: "Senator Mike Gravel, who read the Pentagon Papers during his one-man filibuster to end the Vietnam draft in 1971 has sent you inscribed copies of his book Citizen Power, to encourage you to allow petitioning ONLINE for municipal ballot initiatives. He's 88, in and out of the hospital and forgot a copy for Aaron. You can have mine. Ralph Nader's forward reads, "Senator Gravel's National Initiative for Democracy is the most fundamental proposal I've ever seen or read about by any candidate in any major party in the United States." Nader quotes Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power." Gravel writes that such "empowerment must take the form of lawmaking - the central power of government." He goes on to cite the 170-year success of direct democracy in Switzerland, which keeps Parliament humble and representing the majority. Direct democracy doesn't undermine representative government as the City attorney claimed here Dec 19th, but underlies it, in Switzerland and in Boulder, where it kept proposed hotels and other development off our mountain backdrop, gave us the country's first voter-approved open space, the country's first gay rights law, public campaign financing that helped elect most of you and stopped the practice of council members quitting at just the right time to help appoint their successors instead of us electing them. But ballot initiative use has fallen off greatly in Boulder for several reasons, and in 2016 paid petitioners arrived in Boulder, exacerbating problems of forgery, misrepresentation and harassment. Now Big Oil and Gas regularly hires people to harass people petitioning to control fracking." I didn't get to the following, due to the now-two minute limit: "These problems and many more can be easily solved by allowing online petitioning, which will also get people to read petitions before signing permit people to unsign them if they change their mind, sign them while on vacation, Etc. When this moves to the state level, as Democratic candidate for Secretary of State Jena Griswold promises, the people will be able to undo the Colorado legislature's prohibition of local control over fracking, rent, minimum wages, broadband, gun control, even cyanide mining in city limits."