The referendum for legal euthanasia has exceeded 500,000 signatures necessary to be approved. He did it a month early, of momentum. It was enough to put online, last week, the platform to sign from your personal computer or from your own smartphone and the signatures took off.
Inside that half million signatures there is also mine. Partly because it seems like a fair battle to me, partly because signing for a referendum means believing that citizens should be able to express themselves directly on certain issues, such as civil rights. And a little bit why I wanted to see how it worked technologically the thing the Radicals had been fighting for for years and which had just become law: the possibility of signing up for a referendum or a popular initiative law, even online.
Not with a simple click: signing up for a referendum can’t be like liking a post on social media; and not even using the Facebook, Google or Apple credentials that we usually use to log in to the various services on the Net. But using the Spid, the public digital identity system that, also thanks to the pandemic, it took off: in August 2016, as soon as the service was launched, less than 90 thousand people had adopted it; two years later they were just under 3 million; now, there are more than 23 million.
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