Overwhelmed by Petitions, White House Announces New Signature Threshold

Perhaps because they have grown tired of dealing with calls for forced deportations, state Pokemons, and secession, the signature threshold for the “We the People” petition website has been raised to 100,000, up from 25,000, according to the official White House blog.

“Starting today, as we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama Administration,” writes White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips.

“This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist,” he adds.

The announcement is most likely a response to the fact that November and December 2012 saw an explosion in growth on the site: Approximately 2.4 million new users joined, 73,000 petitions were created, and 4.9 million signatures – and email addresses -- were registered.

Courtesy whitehouse.gov

“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,” Phillips notes.

“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,” he adds.

In other words, for those of you who can manage enough energy to “sign” an online petition, “but not enough to actually do anything meaningful,” you’re going to have to find a lot more signatures to merit an official response from the White House.

Courtesy whitehouse.gov

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Featured images courtesy whitehouse.gov.