Calexit breaks up ends petition for 2018 California ballot

YemenExtra

The leaders of the “Calexit” movement, or Yes California, are going their separate ways. Signature-gathering slowed and donors fled amid negative publicity exploiting one organizer’s ties to Russia. Now Californians will have to wait to take up secession.

It was never going to happen anyway, critics said. And while the Yes California campaign may have surprised many last year when it received state authorization to begin collecting signatures for ballot access, it all came to an anticlimactic end on Monday.

“For me, today, my ballot initiative petition drive came to an end,” Yes California leader Louis J. Marinelli wrote to supporters in an email Monday, according to the Sacramento Bee.

The campaign website has yet to be updated.

Yes California was in the middle of signature gathering, aiming to bring the issue of secession to voters on the November 2018 ballot.

If voters agreed to amend the state’s constitution, removing text deeming the republic “inseparable” from the US and declaring the US Constitution to be the “law of the land,” then a follow-up vote to form their own country would take place in March 2019.

That schedule has now been thrown off at least a year, as the former vice president of Yes California, Marcus Ruiz Evans, told the Bee that a similar group he has since joined, the California Freedom Coalition, plans to file new paperwork for ballot access by May 1.

Source: RT