Alwaght- Supporters of an independent California from the United States initiated a formal process to take a public vote on the issue after Donald Trump was named president-elect of the country.
The movement took its first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general’s office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.
Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.
“We’re doing it now because of all of the overwhelming attention,” Evans said.
The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending.
The attorney general’s office will give the ballot measure a title and summary, and Evans said he hopes to begin collecting signatures to get it on the ballot in the spring. Qualifying ballot measures typically requires significant resources to pay signature gatherers, and Yes California doesn’t have major financial backing. But Evans said 13,000 people have volunteered to collect signatures.
“This is real,” Evans said. “We treat it seriously.”
The controversial republican Donald Trump gained a shocking victory to be the 45th US president but his campaign promises of banning Muslims from moving to the country or tracking the US Muslim citizens along with building a wall on the border with Mexico divided US society and there have been reports of democrats plotting to create problems for his future government.
