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We The People Petition Signature Requirement Bumped To 100,000
New submitter schneidafunk writes with news that the White House is raising the signature requirement for petitions from 25,000 to 100,000. From the source: "When we first raised the threshold — from 5,000 to 25,000 — we called it 'a good problem to have.' Turns out that 'good problem' is only getting better, so we're making another adjustment to ensure we’re able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve. ... In the first 10 months of 2012, it took an average of 18 days for a new petition to cross the 25,000-signature threshold. In the last two months of the year, that average time was cut in half to just 9 days, and most petitions that crossed the threshold collected 25,000 signatures within five days of their creation. More than 60 percent of the petitions to cross threshold in all of 2012 did so in the last two months of the year."
"We got tired of answering crazy shit like building a Death Star or putting a Starbucks on the moon, so we want to make it more difficult for the people to express crazy shit while still looking like we give a damn about them."
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
Thanks to those who started petitions for Master Chief statues, roaming motorcycle gangs of justices, and Death Stars. Without you folks making jokes out of serious attempts to make political headway on important issues, we might not have had our collective voices diluted. Making a mockery of those interested in forcing the white house to defend, or oppose, or otherwise make a solid stand of issues sure is helpful.
Let's see what nonsense you can come up with to raise that threshold from 100,000 to 250,000.
More Twoson than Cupertino
at 9 days for 25,000 (if that rate is sustainable) were looking at 36 days to hit 100,000 on a 30 day petition... well played white house
Perhaps if people stopped submitting nonsense petitions there wouldn't be a need to adjust the threshold for an official response.
Okay. How about if there's an overwhelming number of petitions for ridiculous garbage like building Death Stars or annexing Canada? What should they consider doing then?
I'm thinking they should raise the number of signatures that trigger a response, but that's just me.
Perhaps if they stopped submitting nonsense responses there wouldn't be a need to submit nonsense petitions.
Maybe the government is just compiling a list of people who's votes should be filtered out if they sign a petition that the government is not to keen on?
That is one reason, among several good reasons, why we have a secret ballot.
Be assured that anyone wishing to change that has malicious intentions, no matter what excuse they provide.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Because responding to a petition to eliminate (or reform -- I can't remember) the TSA by having the HEAD OF THE F***ING TSA tell us about the awesomeness of his department, and completely ignoring the issues raised by the petitioners isn't making a joke of the process?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Does it really matter? It's a piece of theater to placate idiots into thinking anything they have to say -- even in numbers -- means a shit. Make it five people. Make it a million. It's irrelevant.
Perhaps if people stopped submitting nonsense petitions there wouldn't be a need to adjust the threshold for an official response.
Exactly.
Death Stars? Really?
Thanks a lot all you idiots that jumped on that bandwagon! Nice Job.
You've proven to the elected officials that constituents should be ignored. Happy now?
Equal bitchslaps are deserved by this administration for agreeing that any obviously ridiculous request gets consideration if it shows up in the in-box with enough idiots signing on.
The US has a republican form of government, a Representative Democracy, because the founding fathers foresaw this level of idiocy.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If the threshold were 1, it would clearly be too time consuming.
If the threshold were 300 million, where you need near-unanimous support, it would not.
Finding the right balance, especially when the response rate is increasing, is nontrivial. You must also consider the petitions that aren't utter nonsense but are stupid or impractical for non-obvious reasons, and the fact that even for valid petitions you can only consider so many unless you want to burn another $200k per year taxpayer money for more help.
I don't know how much time is actually spent on nonsense petitions (I saw a few), bad petitions, etc., and I don't know what a reasonable projection is, but there's no reason to be married to the number 25000. Maybe the right number is more. It might even be less, but I honestly though 25k was a bit low in the age of the Internet. A single tweet from a high-profile celebrity would be almost guaranteed to turn into a petition no matter what its merits.
In a democracy *the people* are the arbiters of what is 'nonsense' and what is not. Not some jumped up bureaucrat or an AC fascist apologist. While I might not agree with the Death Star petition, nor the Sharia for USA petition, it doesn't mean that people shouldn't have the chance to put anything to their fellow citizens and have the White House consider them without raising the threshold to un-democratically restrictive levels.
In a democracy *the people* are the arbiters of what is 'nonsense' and what is not. Not some jumped up bureaucrat or an AC fascist apologist. While I might not agree with the Death Star petition, nor the Sharia for USA petition, it doesn't mean that people shouldn't have the chance to put anything to their fellow citizens and have the White House consider them without raising the threshold to un-democratically restrictive levels.
I think people should be allowed to put anything forward, and they still can, the threshold is just bigger before the White House will recognize it.
Given how these have taken off, I don't feel like this is unreasonable or in any way undemocratic. If it only takes about a week to get 25k, it seems like 100k should be in reach if its a half decent petition.
I mean, isn't that around 0.03% of the population? Up from around 0.008%?
Don't make me laugh. If popular news media, slashdot, and 4chan are any indication of anything, it's that "nonsense" appeals far more than "sense". A lot of people are going to vote for something because they think it's funny.
If the majority of people were reliable arbiters of sense, we'd have a lot fewer problems in the world.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The White House itself demonstrated that the petitions were worthless long before any sarcastic petition got approved. 75,000 people asked why Cannabis could not be regulated like alcohol. The White House had the drug czar, who is statutorily prohibited from advocating for drug law reform, respond. He failed to mention alcohol once.
If the White House won't treat our petitions with respect, why should we treat their petition site with respect?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
even worse:
Disban the TSA? here's a response from the head of the TSA
Legalize a drug? Here's a response from the director of drug law enforcement
They don't even have a disinterested person (or someone capable of fulfilling the request) respond.
What we need is a petition system for congressional bill consideration.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Somehow I doubt the "majority of people" in the U.S. would be in favor of:
regularly using robots to kill random strangers in distant countries
spending hundreds of billions prosecuting minor, victimless crimes
while consistently ignoring massive and wide-spread criminal wrongdoing by giant corporations because, "hey, they're big!"
handing control of their currency to a clique of unelected bankers who then hand out said money by the (virtual) truckload to the aforementioned giant corporations
cutting sweetheart deals with industry on everything from medical care to oil spill cleanup, at the expense of said majority
.
Death Stars? Really?
Thanks a lot all you idiots that jumped on that bandwagon! Nice Job.
You've proven to the elected officials that constituents should be ignored. Happy now?
I think it was a way for the people to say "you don't seem to take this seriously, so why should we?"
Name just one petition that caused any change, or even that the government appointed a study group to get facts. This is no better than your congressman's automated canned replies stating how much he values your input, followed by ten lines of text proving that he didn't value it enough to even skim-read it. Well, the difference is that the congressman sends a reply for each petition, while the government is honest enough to admit it ignores individuals (but not honest enough to admit it ignores thousands of them too).
Sadly, the only way to the government's ears is through a CEO (or, for some presidents, through charlatans like astrologists and reverends).
no one reasonable ever thought that this was a real thing.
the fact that people BOUGHT this bullshit (that those in charge care about our needs) is even more amazing.
give it up, people. they don't CARE about us. they simply don't care. they got theirs and that's all that matters to them.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"I've said it before and I'll say it again, Democracy simply doesn't work."
-- Kent Brockman, Channel 6 News
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.