A few weeks ago KGNU radio's Maeve Conran interviewed longtime former Boulder City Councilman Steve Pomerance and I about the City of Boulder's delaying and mismanagement of the City online petition system for ballot initiatives that voters approved 71 to 29% in November 2018.

You can hear (or read a reasonably good transcript) of some of what we said, at the link. Maeve tried to get the city to respond, with no luck, thus the delay broadcasting this until this morning. 

The  City has tied our project into so many knots that not even Steve Pomerance and I could clarify things in the limited time on the air. If you look back on the other updates to this petition you can read plenty. 

It now appears, since the city has gone silent on the issue, that they are not signing any contracts as they intended, but are waiting for the new Council elected tomorrow to pick up the pieces. That may be thanks to the letter that 5 Council candidates and I sent to City staff. Many thanks to Adam Swetlik , Rachel Friend, Susan Peterson, Mark McIntyre and Gala Orba for signing the letter.

As the creator of this petition & spearhead of getting it through the City Campaign Finance and Elections working group, through Council, and passed by the voters, we should be asking the new Council to accept Maplight.org's longstanding offer of a free open source online ready to go online petition system.

Then we get Boulder's famous programmer community to try to hack it. If it's secure, great. If not, then we spend hundreds of thousands (staff asked for $400,000 for the online system in the new budget proposal) on something better. 

It will be very interesting to find out why an entire year since voters passed this has been wasted. I suspect that all the powerful forces behind Colorado Amendment 71 got wind of it and will do anything to kill it.

As Noam Chomsky says, "there's nothing the ruling class hates more than democracy.'

It ain't dead yet.