Petitions on White House website: Citizens in Missouri, Kansas & other states want to secede from US

WASHINGTON - Following the outcome of the Nov. 6 election, groups from Kansas and Missouri are among nearly two dozen petitioning for their states to secede from the United States.

The Sunflower and Show-Me states are among the 22 where residents are forming petitions to withdraw from the U.S. and from their own government.

The "We the People" group cites a clause of the Declaration of Independence in its movement that states "whenever the government derives from the powers of the people, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute a new government."

The petitions, located on petitions.whitehouse.gov, typically follow the same phrasing, "We petition the Obama administration to peacefully grant the State of [Blank] to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government."

They also all cropped up shortly after the election.

Petitions have been filed for Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.

Among the 22 states in the secede petition, 17 of them voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

If the petition gets 25,000 signatures by Dec. 10, "it will be put in a queue to be reviewed by the White House," according to the government website.

Protected by the First Amendment, the site allows for a quick and easy petition process. For questions like these, however, the system may not best represent the state citizens' true views.

A quick login and click enables a user to sign a petition without providing what state they reside in. The user is only allowed to sign once.

No response has yet been made, which would also be found on the site.

Nearly a dozen other petitions have reached the 25,000-signature plateau, including a petition outlawing the offense of major religious prophets and one demanding the administration "Recount the Election!"

For more information about the petition, visit www.petitions.whitehouse.gov

KJRH & RTV6 contributed to this report