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We The People Petition Signature Requirement Bumped To 100,000

Posted by Unknown on from the making-it-harder-to-accomplish-nothing dept.

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."

28 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by killfixx · · Score: 5, Funny

    "We're so pleased at the response, we're going to make it that much more difficult to earn a response from this office. Good luck!"

    Shenanigans.

    Next stop, 1 Million!

    Yay.

    --
    "Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
    1. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Perhaps if people stopped submitting nonsense petitions there wouldn't be a need to adjust the threshold for an official response.

    2. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by biek · · Score: 5, Funny

      There's no way there are 75,000 more people on the internet with nothing to do.

    3. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Y'know guys... if there's an overwhelming number of petitions to dramatically change things, maybe, just maybe, you should consider actually fixing shit that's constantly being petitioned about instead of saying "no, fuck you", and closing the petition.

      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.

    4. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by Nidi62 · · Score: 4, Funny

      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?

      Build the Death Star, then use it to annex Canada

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    5. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Perhaps if they stopped submitting nonsense responses there wouldn't be a need to submit nonsense petitions.

    6. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by smitty97 · · Score: 4, Funny

      But we really wanted a Death Star!

      --
      mod me funny
    7. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by Your.Master · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    8. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by dnahelicase · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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%?

    9. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by oGMo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In a democracy *the people* are the arbiters of what is 'nonsense' and what is not.

      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

    10. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by johnny+cashed · · Score: 5, Informative

      Check your facts, the USA is a democratic republic . It is not a pure, mob rule democracy. And that is a good thing.

    11. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!
    12. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by CanHasDIY · · Score: 5, Informative

      In a democracy

      This isn't a democracy - it's a Constitutional Republic with democratically elected Representation. Worlds of difference.

      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.

      Caveat - I completely agree.

      However, you don't need democracy for that - the Constitution guarantees your right, as an individual, to petition the government for redress of grievances. Group participation is not a requirement.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    13. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by MatrixCubed · · Score: 5, Funny

      Bloody peasant.

    14. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by cheekyjohnson · · Score: 5, Informative

      Especially the one about the TSA. They didn't even try to make it seem as if they actually care in that case.

      --
      Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
    15. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      .

      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).

    16. Re:IOW, we're making it harder get a response... by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I get canned replies/propaganda from a congresswoman, you insensitive clod!

      A woman can be a congressman (or freshman or ombudsman) too. All women are men; mankind comprises both sexes, despite what the PC brigade and redstockings want you to believe. Sometimes women manhandle people and commit manslaughter, and have their manservant drop the body down a manhole. Or shoot a minuteman rocket over no-man's-land with showmanship.
      A woman is human, not huwoman.

      It's men that are discriminated against by language - we don't have the counterpart word to woman that excludes females and children. If I said "werman", no man would understand what I meant.

      I know I'm fighting a losing battle, but I think it's important to let "man" continue to mean "person" for as long as possible, and where it's natural to do so.
      And a person's gender shouldn't matter anyhow unless you're sexist.

  2. Translation by longbot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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
  3. Thanks to the jokesters by Applekid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Thanks to the jokesters by waspleg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      People only did this because they ignored the real petitions and even most of the ones they answer are canned bullshit PR responses. It's a gimmick to make you think they care at all in any way whatsoever what you think.

    2. Re:Thanks to the jokesters by LordLucless · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Making jokes out of serious attempts to make political headway on important issues

      Ah hahahahahahaha.

      Wait, you're serious? The jokes are the only ones getting attention because people have realised just how pointless putting a real issue up for debate is. Bring up anything remotely important, and all you'll get is the canned response about how the current policies are best.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    3. Re:Thanks to the jokesters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'd hardly call these petitions a "serious attempt to make political headway." People figured out pretty early on, from responses like that to the highly earnest pot legalization petition, that the White House was basically going to be using these things to trot out boilerplate responses and the occasional cutesy "haha, Star Wars reference" fluff piece. Better that people recognize these petition responses for the pointless PR exercise they are than labor under the delusion that this (or any) administration cares that a few thousand people have signed a viral internet petition. If you want to actually influence the policy of either political party on a federal level, you better bring a few hundred million dollars (or a few thousand swing state voters) to the table.

    4. Re:Thanks to the jokesters by pclminion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      You have it exactly backward. People did take it seriously. Only when it became apparent that the administration did not also take it seriously, did we begin to deliberately mock the system with these made-up issues. It is clear the administration doesn't care what petitioners are saying. By filling the queue with ridiculous nonsense we are perpetrating a satire designed to expose the false nature of the thing.

      When the administration takes it seriously then we will also. We started in good faith and received only bullshit in response. Now we're feeding the bullshit back into the system.

    5. Re:Thanks to the jokesters by sootman · · Score: 4, Informative

      Mod parent up. I came here to say the same thing. Once they demonstrated that they weren't going to give meaningful answers to serious questions, it turned into "well, we may as well use this to entertain ourselves."

      --
      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    6. Re:Thanks to the jokesters by cpm99352 · · Score: 4, Informative

      There were at least two serious petitions that were blown off - legalization of marijuana and elimination of TSA.

      Kudos to the White House for changing the URLs so that Google searches return bad links, and no search on the petition page.

      Oddly, searching for "Neill Franklin" the author of a petition, returns no results. His petition is discussed here

      Searching the White House petition page for "TSA" also returns zero results, despite it having been open for voting.

      I find it astonishing that anyone with an IQ over 120 supports this administration.

  4. Re:Time to sign the Aaron Swartz prosecutor petiti by mellon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Crap, broken link. This one should work.

  5. How about a petition to lower the requirement? by Forever+Wondering · · Score: 5, Funny

    Getting 100,000 signatures on a petition to lower the requirement to 50,000 might have just the right touch of irony ...

    --
    Like a good neighbor, fsck is there ...
  6. And the WH isn't BS'ing? by sconeu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.