Jane C. Timms for NBC News: “Michigan candidates for statewide office need to gather thousands of signatures to qualify for the ballot in state elections, and many campaigns hire paid canvassers to collect those signatures. The defendants allegedly ran three business entities that were used to defraud nine campaigns out of hundreds of thousands of dollars; after being paid top dollar to gather thousands of signature petitions, they allegedly returned thousands of obviously forged signatures to their clients.”

Is there any part of our nation’s electoral system than is more antiquated than its signature-gathering component? What century was the paper-and-pen technology used for this process invented? Just think of what problems could be avoided, and what positive reforms could be possible, if signature-gathering occurred online. Registered voters could access a database where they could electronically sign candidacy petitions. Canvassers for campaigns could still go door-to-door, carrying tablets or smartphones, and voters could enter the password-protected online system on those devices instead of their own. Because signature-gathering is not a secret ballot, the challenges of protecting the computer-based system against hacking, fraud, etc., is not the same as it would be for online voting (which currently faces prohibitive obstacles because of the necessity to maintain the secret ballot). Essentially, online signature-gathering would pose the same computer security challenges as online banking (and other online activities that enable the customer to retain a receipt to verify the accuracy of the transaction).

If we moved to a system of online signature-gathering, we could rethink the relationship between (1) signature-gathering by candidates to qualify for the ballot in an election and (2) the election that follows among the qualified candidates. Currently, signature-gathering is considered a significant barrier-to-entry for candidates and their campaigns. The costs of signature-gathering is high, as indicated in this news story. But if signature-gathering moved online, the barrier-to-entry could become essentially zero: any aspiring candidate’s campaign could post its petition for candidate in the system, where it would be available to all registered voters to view and consider. True, it might still be expensive for campaigns to go door-to-door to collect signatures, but in this new system campaigns could send online messages to solicit signatures with links to the official portal where registered voters could go to sign the petition. In this kind of system, we could conceive of signature-gathering as the first stage of the overall electoral process, where all aspiring candidates must achieve a sufficient level of support to move onto the next stage, presumably a primary election (either partisan or nonpartisan) depending on how the state wishes to conduct its primary elections. Mathematically, signature-gathering is same as approval voting (at least when a voter is permitted to sign as many candidacy petitions as they wish). Therefore, an online signature-gathering system could be viewed as a kind of “pre-primary” election that uses approval voting as its electoral method. With this system, the primaries themselves could be limited to a reasonable number of candidates, by setting signature-gathering thresholds at appropriate levels. There would be no need for 20, 30, even 50 candidates to appear on the primary ballot, as has happened in California and Alaska, which operate nonpartisan primaries. And if primaries are limited to a handful of candidates, it becomes possible to reconsider the appropriate relationship of primaries (whether partisan or nonpartisan) to general elections.

But these innovative possibilities remain off-limits as long as signature-gathering remains stuck using pre-modern technology.