The official blog post (sorry for the CNET blogspam): http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/15/why-we-re-raising-...
White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
11–20 of 133 posts
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#12It started out at 5,000 signatures. Then it went to 25k. Now it's 100k?
We don't want to listen. Oh, you actually want us to? Let's placate the sheep for a few more months.
If a petition ever gets to 100k it'll go up to one million.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#13The 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 to peacefully secede" petitions that followed?
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#14Makes 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.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#15It started out at 5,000 signatures. Then it went to 25k. Now it's 100k?
We don't want to listen. Oh, you actually want us to? Let's placate the sheep for a few more months. If a petition ever gets to 100k it'll go up to one million.
There have been petitions with over 100k signatures. There are open ones (less than 30 days old) right now.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#16I 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?
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#17It started out at 5,000 signatures. Then it went to 25k. Now it's 100k?
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.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#18If 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.
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.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#19Why not make it a percentage of the (qualified to vote) population?
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#20I 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.
What can a quorum of 50k people accomplish in Germany?