These petitions will not mean anything if one person in Delaware or China could make 100,000 accounts using 100,000 email addresses and vote for the secession of states they've never resided in.
To make these petitions count for something, a check for obvious duplicates and geographically eroneous IP addresses should be ran to ensure at least that amateur dupers haven't invalidated the results.
If this petition program is to go forward to future cycles after December, there should be measures in place to ensure that hackers cannot also dupe the system with fake IP addresses, 'zombie' terminals and other methods.