Residents living on the West Coast won't have the chance to live in the newly-formed states of Jefferson, Silicon Valley or North California as soon as some in the traditional Golden State had hoped.

That's because a ballot initiative that would have let California voters decide whether to divide their state six ways failed to gather enough signatures to make it onto an upcoming ballot, the California secretary of state has said.

Largely funded by venture capitalist Tim Draper, the so-called "Six Californias" campaign contested the secretary of state's conclusion, according to a report by USA Today.

"Six Californias collected more than enough signatures to place the initiative on the November 2016 ballot and we are confident that a full check of the signatures would confirm that fact," Draper said in a statement.

The group back in July announced it had gathered 1.3 million signatures, comfortably over the target 808,000 needed to get on the November 2016 ballot, said the USA Today piece.

Draper asserts state residents would be better served by smaller governments; the Six Californias group, therefore, was preparing to roll out six individual websites for each of the proposed states -- which, aside from the three already mentioned, would include South California, West California and Central California.

The discrepancy between the number of valid signatures Draper and his fellow supporters say they had gathered and the lower count calculated by the state is based on how the signatures were confirmed, the USA Today story continued.

According to the secretary of state's office, about 66 percent of the signatures submitted, or 752,685, were considered valid.

To qualify for a ballot initiative, a person or group submits the signatures to the relevant county, or counties, which then in turn verify the raw count of signatures -- in this case, 1.14 million.

If the total raw count seems to be enough, the state goes forward with a random sample of the collected signatures to make sure they've been submitted by qualified, registered voters.

The "random sampling" approach is a notable example of California's "current, archaic system," Draper said, which prompted his group to push for breaking up the state in the first place.

He noted in the USA Today report that the internal verification process his signature-gathering firm used predicted a much higher validity rate than the state did.

"Six Californias will conduct a review of the signatures determined to be invalid by the registrars in several counties to determine if they were in fact valid signatures. The internal verification process conducted by our signature-gathering firm predicted a much higher validity rate than the random sample result. It is unfortunate that the current, archaic, system has delayed this process," Draper said. "It is yet another example of the dysfunction of the current system and reinforces the need for six fresh, modern governments. In the meantime, we will work with the Secretary of State to verify all of the signatures gathered during the petition process."