White House, Tiring of Death Stars And Deportation Requests, Ups 'We The People' Signature Threshold From 25,000 To 100,000

from the 4chan-says:-challenge-accepted! dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

The White House has just raised the signature threshold at the "We the People" website from 25,000 to 100,000 , no doubt in an attempt to trim down the number of Death Star/deportation/secession/impeachment petitions it must respond to. (Why no one thought to kill two birds with one stone and exile Piers Morgan to the newly-seceded Republic of Texas is beyond me.) Of course, it's been very selective in answering petitions up to this point, making the signature threshold essentially meaningless, but let's try to view the positive aspects.The new level will only apply to petitions going forward, meaning that those that met the previous threshold level will still be ignored/glad-handed in the administration's consistently arbitrary fashion. While this new level looks at first glance to be the sort of workload easing common to entrenched government entities, the fact is that We the People's traffic has doubled over the past two months. According to the numbers posted, petitions are passing the 25,000 signature threshold within five days, which is a bit of a problem when over 70,000 petitions get crafted in less than 60 days.In fact, a petition to lower the count "for taking us seriously" back to the previous level has already gathered over 1,500 signatures (in less than a day), possibly sending the White House on a collision course with some sort of signature threshold loop. (Not that this systemworks like that, but it's fun to pretend...)Unsurprisingly, the top three petition categories are Civil Rights, Government Reform and Human Rights, suggesting that the American people are very unhappy with the ongoing rights erosion in this country -- and that they know where to start fixing this. Of course, the administration has been more than willing to route around obstacles like the Bill of Rights, so several thousand e-signatures isn't exactly going to break it of this habit. But, if any politician is interested in catching up on the issues their constituentscare about, they could do worse than taking a long, hard look at petitions from these three categories.While it's far from a perfect system, it's the best we've got, as they say. Raising the threshold levelresult in more petitions with broader support receiving responses, barring any sort of 4chan-esque ballot stuffing. Even if many of the responses tend to be talking-point heavy and come across as a bit "canned," at least some of those petitioning the government will be able to walk away (angrily, most likely) from the experience with some sort of closure. The administration does need to be more responsive -- both in number of petitions responded to and in the quality of the answers. Talking points may be great when delivering a "top down" stump speech, but they don't really stand up to the sort of scrutiny the internet can deliver.

Filed Under: petitions, white house