Online secession petitions receive hundreds of thousands of signatures

Upset with the election results from last week, conservatives have filled the White House’s “We the People” website with petitions to allow their states to secede from the country.

The site allows citizens to write petitions and gather signatures, and those with at least 25,000 signatures will receive a White House review. The petition for Texas to secede currently has more than 80,000 signatures, while one for Louisiana has garnered just under 30,000.

In total, as of Tuesday afternoon, 36 secession petitions have been posted and have garnered a total of more than 508,000 virtual signatures—although the extent of individuals signing more than one petition is unclear, as the site doesn’t prohibit citizens from signing a petition in a state they don’t reside in.

Although the online petitions won’t actually bring about secession, it represents dissatisfaction among citizens. One petition organizer told the Daily Caller he got involved “just to do something, anything, to show we’re not going away quietly.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry clarified today that he does not support his state’s secession petition. Perry’s press secretary, Catherine Frazier, told The Dallas Morning News that Perry “believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change that.”

She added, “But he also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government. Now more than ever our country needs strong leadership from states like Texas, that are making tough decisions to live within their means, keep taxes low and provide opportunities to job creators so their citizens can provide for their families and prosper.”

States that have received the most signatures include Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and Arkansas. Eight states have more than one petition on the site.

Many of the petitions include this message: “As the founding fathers of the United States of America made clear in the Declaration of Independence in 1776: ‘When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“‘… Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government. …’”