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By Boulder Weekly Staff. Originally published in the Boulder Weekly on May 20, 2021.
"Last year, organizers for Bedrooms Are for People (BAFP), who were circulating a petition to increase housing occupancy limits to the amount of bedrooms in a home plus one, were given incorrect information by the City of Boulder and had to scrap their petition. This year, things are different. Using the City’s digital signature-gathering platform, Boulder Direct Democracy Online, organizers announced this week they’ve collected the 3,336 signatures needed to get their measure on the ballot come November. Once the City certifies the petition next month, organizers say it’ll be the first initiative in the nation to secure a spot on the ballot via an online petitioning system. Because the signatures were collected digitally, voter identification and verification was partly done in the process of signing the ballot — though there were wrinkles to iron out, which BAFP organizers took the lead on resolving. Still, the City will review the signatures by June 15 and either legally certify the measure for the ballot or send it back to organizers with 10 days to collect enough signatures to meet the threshold. The announcement that BAFP met the signature threshold marks a milestone for the online signature-gathering process, which City voters approved in 2018, and which was finally implemented for the 2021 election cycle."