The White House is a victim of its own success. For the second time since it introduced its petition page, the administration is increasing the threshold of signatures required to receive an official response.
Now, new petitions will need 100,000 signatures within 30 days in order for the White House to answer them publicly.
In Oct. 2011, the threshold was raised to 25,000 from 5,000, but that wasn't enough to stop the torrent of joke petitions.
"'We the People,' on the one hand -- by way of the petitions that have populated it -- is totally, ridiculously absurd," wrote The Atlantic.
"There was the Death Star request. And the secession movement. And the petition to deport British-born CNN host Piers Morgan. And the entreaty to designate and protect the Sasquatch as an indigenous species. And the appeal to nationalize the Twinkie. The 'We the People' site has received, the White House says, 141,310 petitions over the course of its young existence. And many of those have been, effectively, hoaxes -- elaborate yet low-investment jokes played by citizens rising up, coming together, and exercising their constitutional right to troll. "
The Death Star petition garnered over 34,000 signatures within the allotted 30 days, triggering a tongue-in-cheek response from the administration.
"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," said the White House in a blog post. "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."
In an interesting move, the White House said it wanted to integrate official petitions with other online petition sites, presumably like Change.org, so it has released the source code to its own site.
"This increasing adoption strengthens our resolve to build new features, including an API that would allow other popular online petition platforms to integrate with our official one. To that end we've released the source code to 'We the People' and would love to connect with any enterprising engineers who want to help out."
- Contribute to this Story:
- Send us a tip
- Send us a photo or video
- Suggest a correction
