
White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K - Wingman4l7
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57564203-93/white-house-raises-petition-signature-threshold-to-100k/
======
jlangenauer
Petitions are encouraged precisely because they're completely ineffective: a
safety valve to allow people to believe they're effecting change when in fact
nothing is changing.

If petitions actually worked, they'd be banned.

~~~
rauljara
Apologies in advance. <cranky rant> I am so sick of these democracy doesn't
work, the powers that be own us, utterly worthless statements. Worthless is
the sense that all they do is justify your own inaction.

So many people take the fact the government doesn't work the way they want it
to as evidence that democracy doesn't work. It's a fallacy. What they have
trouble understanding is that while we may largely agree that certain problems
exist (very few people are in favor of corruption in government) we are
incredibly divided on how to solve those problems. My (imperfect) solution
would be publicly financed elections and a complete end to campaign
contributions. There are many people who feel passionately that campaign
contributions == free speech. There isn't enough public support for one
solution or another to override the institutional inertia that was built into
the constitution by design.

It isn't evidence that democracy doesn't work, it's evidence that your
position doesn't have enough support.

But when positions do gain support, things really do change. We've passed
constitutional amendments outlawing slavery, giving women the vote, and
instituting civil rights. Jesus Christ, do you understand just how hard
getting each of those things passed was? Do you understand how many entrenched
and powerful interests had to be overcome? Do you understand just how little
shouting that democracy doesn't work would have accomplished when faced with
moral injustices like that?

If your solution isn't getting passed, work on convincing people that it's the
right solution. But don't scream democracy doesn't work when it doesn't get
passed because not enough people care about it or agree with it. That actually
is democracy working exactly how its supposed to.

Change opinions. Don't rant about how they don't matter. </rant>

~~~
jlangenauer
It's not an argument that "democracy" doesn't work, it's an argument that the
current institutional arrangements aren't really democracy - at least in the
sense that the public are actually directly or indirectly governing
themselves.

Now, in that sense, let's review exactly how "our"[ _] government measures up:
Individual citizens or groups of citizens have minimal means of influencing
their own government through the means of the system - i.e. their
representatives. Petitions change nothing, letters to representations to MPs /
Congresspeople will receive a form reply and will usually be ignored.
Occasionally, when public sentiment doesn't conflict too badly with economic
interests, minor tweaks can be made, but that's about it.

Where real change has occurred, it has been done so _outside* the
institutional parameters of the system. The abolition of slavery took a _civil
war_ , and the vote for women and civil rights took massive public protests,
illegal acts and (in the case of the suffragettes in the UK) hunger strikes.

So yes, change is possible. But it was never achieved within the confines of a
system largely designed and evolved (I contend) to limit public participation,
and certainly not by online petitions.

[*] Not everyone is from the US, y'know.

~~~
rauljara
> Not everyone is from the US, y'know.

Incredibly valid point. The angry rant above was hastily written (typos and
all) in response to a thread about a change to US public policy. That's my
excuse as to why I got it wrong, not an attempt to say that I actually got it
right.

> The abolition of slavery took a civil war

The actual passage of the amendment took an act of democracy, however, that
still had to overcome mountains of entrenched interests even with the South
temporarily out of the picture.

> and the vote for women and civil rights took massive public protests,
> illegal acts and (in the case of the suffragettes in the UK) hunger strikes.

All of which worked to change public opinion, and pass those bills through the
democratic process.

My angry rant was probably less towards your statement than similar ones that
I've heard too many times. So I apologize for directing it all at you.

I do strictly disagree that if petitions worked, they'd be banned, however.
Petitions are nothing new; the only thing about Obama's site is the ease with
which they can be made and the promise of a response. And petitions have
worked in the past to effect change either directly, by making those in power
aware of people's strongly held petitions, or indirectly, by helping to raise
awareness and eventually changing policy by swaying opinion. They do work, _if
they have enough support_.

I know you weren't explicitly making this argument, but many were complaining
about how terrible it was that 25,000 signature petitions weren't effecting
real change. The US is a nation of over 314,000,000 people. It would be
madness if any 25,000 member subset of them could meaningfully coerce the
government to action. I'm happy that the bar is being raised to 100,000. I
kind of hope it gets raised to something higher. Once you start being able to
describe the number in terms of millions it starts carrying real weight. And
if people know that that's what they have to shoot for, they'll be more likely
to achieve to it.

~~~
jbooth
There's a follow-on effect too, that organizing to get 100k signatures for
anything, even the death star petition, creates networks of activists. Some of
them stay active afterwards.

------
jessaustin
Whether the threshold is 100K or 100M, nothing has happened yet as a result of
a "successful" petition. Sure, the stupid petitions give them a chance to
giggle at the rubes. The most reasonable petitions get essentially the same
reaction, however. ["Legalize pot? I think we can guess what they were smoking
when they signed that one! Hahahaha!"] As much as I wish it were otherwise, I
expect the same for the current "fire the prosecutor" petition. Ortiz might be
reassigned to a different state, but only as part of a promotion: she's been
"playing ball". They want federal prosecutors to be tone-deaf automatons of
sovereign vengeance out of any sense of proportion. This petition is proof
that she is what they want. She'll probably print out the page and have it
framed for her new office in New York or DC or wherever.

~~~
dasil003
What do you suggest then? Resigning ourselves to apathy would seem to play
right into their hand. Obviously a lot more than a petition is necessary to
effect change, but it seems a reasonable place to start.

~~~
justin66
> Obviously a lot more than a petition is necessary to effect change, but it
> seems a reasonable place to start.

If you live in the United States you have a congressperson. Contacting them is
a much more reasonable place to start.

~~~
dasil003
Okay, but a petition is a public focal point that takes 30 seconds to
contribute too. The cynical attitude "I'm not going to do this because it
won't help" is probably a greater negative to one's personal effect on the
cause than however much time it might waste.

~~~
steveplace
With the current legislature, a local vocal group of constituents is a much
more effective means of citizen-government communication than an internet
survey that takes 30 seconds to contribute to.

~~~
dasil003
Why is it either-or?

------
Udo
Calling whatever is going on with that website "petitions" is a pretty
misleading move, and it has been from the start. The "petitions" carry even
less weight than ones gathered manually by interest groups, and they certainly
carry absolutely no weight if you compare them to legally necessary petitions
(such as putting candidates on ballots).

What (now) 100k votes gets you is a guaranteed response from a White House
spokesperson. That's all. For a WH person to even look at a few sentences of
text, it takes 100k people. For the most part, neither petitioners nor the
spokesperson take those things seriously. As it is, a petition carries less
weight than a reporter asking a third-tier aide a policy question.

I'm sure someone at the WH has made the argument internally already if
something appears on the "petition" website, that's a pretty good indicator
_not_ to do whatever is asked.

The "petition" site is also a genius move as far as fake openness and the
illusion grassroots democracy goes because it neatly captures and binds both
crackpots and armchair activists in a safe bundle where they are guaranteed to
have absolutely no impact whatsoever. Politics is not made by internet people,
nor is politics made _for_ people in any way.

~~~
smackfu
>What (now) 100k votes gets you is a guaranteed response from a White House
spokesperson.

And it might even be customized for your exact case, rather than "form letter
gun control response #27".

~~~
Udo
True. I'm not really suggesting the site is a bad idea, but I think people
should bear in mind it's essentially just a Q&A.

------
brudgers
My first reaction to the announcement was negative:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064624>

But now, I am not so sure. Raising the threshold seems like a sound response
to the program gaining traction if the Whitehouse wants it to succeed -
closing it down would be the simple response if their goal was not to be
bothered. Raising the threshold (a second time) invites people to take the low
effort act of signing a petition more seriously - even if this seems a bit
counter intuitive at first blush.

Imagine if a response from the Whitehouse required just one signature. It
would sure gain traction. But it would encourage triviality. "It's 1am, Barry.
Make my neighbor's dog shut up."

Increasing the threshold requires more political organization. At the original
5000 signatures, the barrier to entry posed from organizing was low enough to
reward minimal success at political organization. Moving it to 25,000 required
better organization.

Barry believes in the power of grassroots political organization to the point
of putting his money in the form of a Harvard JD where his mouth is. Two
campaigns for president have shown him that much of its future will be
implemented with digital tools.

The Whitehouse is seeking the sweet spot of participatory democracy at the
scale of the Whitehouse. If, as I suspect, similar strategies are implemented
at lower levels of government, Democrat party leadership now has data upon
which to make informed decisions at those levels.

With any petition, signing is a trivial effort. Buy-in comes from watching
progress not from demanding answers. The speed with which signatures were
collected for petitions related to Aaron Swartz's death shows that the
threshold was too low. Firing the prosecutor expresses anger, but it doesn't
seek structural change. Lynch mobs don't.

~~~
NathanKP
"Firing the prosecutor expresses anger, but it doesn't seek structural change.
Lynch mobs don't."

That was pretty much exactly what I said in a comment on that petition the day
it was posted on HN. I received multiple downvotes right away, and things
didn't balance out until several days later when the comment finally reached 1
point again.

So I agree that the low threshold makes it too easy for a short term "anger
wave" to reach the petition threshold. But I also think that by making the
threshold too high you lose the possibility of smaller interest groups getting
attention.

Politics is already about the big players, and the giant special interest
groups with the millions and millions of dollars to play with. There were
already very few successful petitions that actually got responses, now there
will be even fewer.

------
Wingman4l7
FWIW, I highly doubt that this has anything to do with the Aaron Swartz
petitions. It's more likely because of the recent petitions to build a Death
Star, secede from the Union, protect the Sasquatch as an indigenous species,
and (I shit you not) petitions to "stop white genocide".

~~~
jeltz
Wont this kind of petitions always get more votes than ones about serious
issues? If so what does raising the bar help?

------
bendmorris
Bullshit. Before this change, plenty of petitions exceeded 25k and were
ignored because there was no easy political solution. Now petitions will have
to reach 100k before being ignored. Maybe it's time to actually exercise our
right to assemble and not be pacified by the presence of a petition website.

------
Wingman4l7
The official blog post (sorry for the CNET blogspam):
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/15/why-we-re-
raising-...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/15/why-we-re-raising-
signature-threshold-we-people)

------
metl_lord
I like the idea of the We The People petitions, but I think the focus is
wrong. Petitioning the president is a way to get an idea noticed, but it's not
the way the legislative process in this country works. Laws are created by the
Congress. I think it would be a much more effective system if it petitioned
Congress.

Right now you can contact your representatives, but I think this system of
online petitions would work if the party leadership agreed to have a
representative respond to each petition instead of a White House staffer.

------
robomartin
Repeat after me:

I will not discuss politics on HN.

I will not discuss politics on HN.

I will not discuss politics on HN.

I will not discuss politics on HN.

I will not discuss politics on HN.

One of my personal guidance statements (I hate resolutions) for this year in
order to (a) keep the off-topic noise down and, (b) not engage in debates that
are often pointless, can be offensive and end-up not helping anyone or fixing
anything.

I am trying hard to stick to this. So far, so good. Although temptation is
sometimes great. Almost caved-in a couple of times.

I rather be far more constructive and focus on tech.

~~~
Wingman4l7
I did hesitate before submitting this, but decided that it was on topic as it
may have insights into the ever-present issue of signal-to-noise ratios in
large online communities.

------
k-mcgrady
Makes sense. In the UK we need 100k signatures and the population is obviously
much smaller. The government probably got tired of having to respond to things
like building the Death Star.

~~~
jrogers65
> got tired of having to respond to things like building the Death Star.

Their loss, really.

I'm half joking - putting more money into space research might net us
interesting things like cheaper energy (solar panels with no atmosphere or
clouds to obscure them) and materials (asteroid mining). A major space station
would certainly help with that.

~~~
chii
interesting you mention space research - the only real reason the US of A made
it to the moon is because of the cold war.

Perhaps it does take an "enemy" to focus the efforts of a nation. And with the
fairly peaceful times now (at least, for the major powerhouses), that doesn't
seem at all likely.

------
thehodge
Makes sense given the population of the USA, I always thought 25k was too low,
wasn't it modelled off Sweden or something which has a much smaller
population?

------
jiggy2011
If I was a government official and wanted to troll an entire country, I would
set something like this up along with a script that behaved as follows: As
soon as signatures for any petition came within 4% of threshold value I would
automatically double the threshold.

~~~
tobinfricke
Note that, in the case of the White House petitions, the higher threshold does
not apply to already-existing petitions, only petitions created in the future.
The White House is not trolling in the manner you suggest.

------
ttaubert
I think this really makes sense given that in Germany we have a quorum of 50k
with a much smaller population. The same thing is probably true for other
smaller countries as well.

~~~
tobinfricke
What can a quorum of 50k people accomplish in Germany?

~~~
Xylakant
Your petition might get a reading in the Parliament and you're allowed to
speak. However, this is not a guaranteed outcome, the Bundestag or rather the
committee in charge of petitions may deny you the public reading with a 2/3
majority.

However, on the state level there is a "Volksentscheid" where the people can
directly vote or enforce a vote on an issue. The quorum and the topics that
are eligible for a Volksentscheid depend on the states legislation. Berlin for
example allows a vote on general topics of interest while other states only
allow votes on proposed laws.

~~~
tobinfricke
Have there been any particularly notable uses or outcomes of this process?

~~~
Xylakant
The most notable outcome was probably the petition against internet blocks in
germany [1] which was signed by more than 130 000 persons and was a crucial
milestone in gathering public attention which ultimately brought the law to a
fall.

[1] you know, against child porn. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz> for a short summary.

------
takluyver
The graphs show membership and signatures suddenly rising rapidly in the last
couple of months. The article also mentions it. Is that triggered by the
election, and coverage of the various "Allow <state> to peacefully secede"
petitions that followed?

------
frere
This whole idea was bound to be a failure from the start, but still, the
administration pushed it. Now they validate my original conclusions: this is a
great mechanism to convince the legions of redditors that they actually
matter. Whenever petitions reach the threshold, they can just claim "the
project is so successful, we have to raise limits keep it manageable", when in
reality it is pure window dressing for a President who has successfully
manipulated to youth. Ugh, I wish we had a 3rd party!

------
ohwp
Why not make it a percentage of the (qualified to vote) population?

~~~
tobinfricke
It is already:

(100k signatures / 200M voters) = 0.05%

Public awareness of the petition site is growing much, much more rapidly than
the number of eligible voters in the U.S. Thus it makes more sense to tie the
required number of signatures to the number of people who know about the
petitions site, which is essentially what they are doing.

For example, they might have internal targets of a fixed number of successful
petitions per month, or a fixed fraction of petitions being successful. This
makes sense. To maintain these targets the number of required signatures would
be periodically adjusted.

------
sugartits
If you want to know how effective a system of action is (petitions, marches,
strikes), look at how the government reacts to it. Left-wing causes are a
threat to the regime. That is why we saw police being organized to crush OWS,
and why Federal prosecutors threw the book at Aaron Schwartz.

If you're going to effect a significant change, you're going to need a
critical mass of people coming together to do it. Lone wolves are picked off
with ease.

------
beedogs
That took longer than I expected.

------
binarymax
I would have expected it to be a smaller majority signing a whole bunch of
petitions. Interestingly it looks like it was mostly one signature per
account, until about a month ago (the x-axis really needs more granularity).

What I would really like to see now, is are the accounts signing two petitions
on average, or is it still mostly one signature per account with a handful of
people signing three or more?

------
nakedrobot2
They can require a billion signatures on the petition. We will STILL
successfully petition for a Death Star.

------
27182818284
After the Death Star petition, albeit cute, it was inevitable that they would.

------
tokenadult
As I wrote in the thread under the posting of the original source (the White
House announcement),

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064137>

The founders of the United States knew that a representative democracy (what
they termed a "republic") has some distinct advantages over direct democracy.
This fact was discussed at length in the jointly authored Federalist Papers.

<http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fedpapers.html>

History shows that this fact is rediscovered in each new generation through
hard experience, on a bipartisan basis.

------
teeja
Why didn't they just change it to 100 million and get it over with. If they
couldn't be bothered to respond after 25,000 sigs, they've clearly no
interest.

------
javajosh
Wait a sec. Are politicians supposed to do what we want them to, or are they
supposed to do what they want after we select them for office?

------
thattallguy
Somebody needs to create a petition to reduce the signature threshold back to
25k.

Better yet, a petition to actually act on petitions, would be nice.

~~~
Wingman4l7
There's already at least one:
[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/lower-petition-
cou...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/lower-petition-count-taking-
us-seriously-back-25000-signatures/cNjdpc3R)

------
uvTwitch
Translation: "We really don't want any more Death Star petitions getting
through."

------
y1426i
How silly it would be if the government works only on the popularity vote!!

------
zbowling
It started out at 5,000 signatures. Then it went to 25k. Now it's 100k?

~~~
iuguy
For some reason I'm reminded of Colonel Carthcart in Catch-22[1], who
continually raised the number of missions crew had to fly to complete a tour
of duty.

It's almost like the Whitehouse put the site up to listen to and respond to
the people that elected them, but has to raise the barriers so that it doesn't
have to listen to and respond to the people that elected them. If that's not
Catch-22 in the US government, then I'm not sure what is.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22>

~~~
danso
Yet somehow I think there would be people peeved knowing that the White House
pays a staff to write a reply to every petition that gets the number of
signatures equivalent to the number of retweets Justin Bieber gets when he
blinks.

And yes, a "staff", because someone has to sort/collate the petitions, write
the response, and also legally/factually vet the response, as it isn't a
reddit post but something that is the official voice of the government

~~~
iuguy
Here's a legitimate question that I'd like to know the answer to.

How many petitions on the White House petition site, regardless of the number
of signatories have resulted in a direct change to US policy, in favour of the
petition? I think people should be getting more peeved about the answer to
that question than the number of staff writing non-responses to them.

------
ttar
"If Voting Really Changed Anything, They'd Ban It"

------
randomsearch
Anyone else thinking of a petition against this threshold raise?

RS

~~~
Wingman4l7
There's already at least one:
[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/lower-petition-
cou...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/lower-petition-count-taking-
us-seriously-back-25000-signatures/cNjdpc3R)

------
tesmar2
Ahh...one step closer to direct democracy :)

------
sageikosa
Challenge accepted.

------
wowfat
they should have had a petition to decide if they want to raise this!

