Dragging the Election Code Into the 21st Century: The TEXIT Petition Goes Online

Daniel Miller opens this Thanksgiving-eve coffee talk with what he calls the bombshell: the legal TEXIT petition is now online. After months of pushing, the Texas Nationalist Movement got legal clearance to accept electronic signatures on the petition under the Texas Election Code, and the digital version launched the morning before this broadcast. Miller walks through why it took so long. The strict reading of the election code gave no clean way to make an online petition legally valid, so the early advice from the attorneys was simply don’t do it. The team kept dissecting the statute, leaned on the electronic-signature provisions in the business and occupations code, and built a back-end solution that legal counsel signed off on. He frames the whole thing as precedent-setting, since no one has executed a petition under the Texas Election Code this way before, and presses viewers to share the link and flood it with signatures before the window closes.

He also clears up the disclaimer that keeps confusing people. Signing the petition makes you ineligible to vote in the primary or convention of another party, not the Republican primary where the referendum would actually appear. That language comes straight from the election code, not from the TNM. Around the petition talk, Miller recaps his lieutenant governor campaign, a Project Fort Worth speaking stop, and the open filing window that closes December 13 with primaries set for March 1. He is candid about the grind of balancing the campaign, the movement, and the consulting work that keeps the lights on.

The episode closes on Thanksgiving, which also happened to be Miller’s birthday. He reads from Sam Houston’s 1842 Thanksgiving proclamation, issued for the anniversary of Texas independence, and ties the holiday back to the work of securing and protecting the independence of the nation of Texas.

Questions answered in this episode

• If the United States was built by thirteen sovereign states each holding a share of the assets, why would anyone oppose Texas taking its share when it leaves?
• Is a single withdrawal enough, or should counties get expanded executive power and the ability to break away themselves?
• What resources counter the claim that Texas only left Mexico to preserve slavery?
• How realistic is Texas independence, really?
• Why does the State Guard need to be fully militarized when, as Allen West noted, it currently is not equipped?
• When will the TNM endorse candidates in the primary?
• Will Chad Prather be joining Late Night Coffee Talk again?