Since 2011, the Obama Administration in the United States has maintained an online petitioning system called We the People, billed as a method for citizens to petition their government on issues that are important to them as is protected under the First Amendment. Naturally, as with any open Internet forum, this leads to more light-hearted requests such as one created on November 14 of last year, requesting that the US government find enough money and resources to build a Death Star by 2016. The petition claimed that the construction of a Death Star would “spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration” and “strengthen [the United States’] national defense.”
In the two months since, the petition received 34 435 signatures, allowing it to require an official response from the government. As expected, the request was rejected, citing a cost of more than $850 quadrillion and stating that they were “working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.” They also noted that their Administration “does not support blowing up planets” and that a Death Star would have a flaw “[exploitable] by a one-man starship.” Their response went on to discuss the benefits of the current American infrastructure, such as the International Space Station (ISS), private missions to the ISS and the Moon, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is due to replace the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018.
The Death Star request is only one of many unconventional requests made on the system. One of the earliest requests made on the system (before the 5000 signature threshold was changed) was a petition to release the recipe for White House Honey Ale, a recipe the president stated he’d been drinking on the campaign trail after home brewing it in Washington. After 12 240 requests, the White House released their recipe and revealed they were using honey collected from beehives on the South Lawn as their special ingredient in their Honey Ale, Honey Porter and Honey Blonde brews. A recent petition gained 109 334 signatures petitioning the government to deport British media personality Piers Morgan after his heated interview with Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt, where he argued banning assault rifles was a sensible gun control move. The White House turned down this request, citing First Amendment rights protect his rights to voice his disapproval of the Second Amendment.
To get a response from the Obama Administration, a petition must reach the specified signature threshold within 30 days. The stranger petitions that normally may not receive that many signatures may have played a part in their changing of the signature threshold twice since the system began. The threshold began at 5000 signatures, but rose to 25 000 signatures after the first month due to higher popularity than expected. Just in the past week, the threshold was raised again to 100 000 signatures because of the doubling of users over the past two months. Their blog post explaining the reasoning claimed that while it used to take an average of 18 days for petitions to reach the 25 000 signature threshold, it now takes as short as 9 days for petitions to reach this goal. By increasing the threshold, they make the system more resilient to impulse campaigns spawned by short-sighted reactions to policy announcements.
Changing the threshold to 100 000 signatures will unfortunately cut out a lot of petitions like the ones that are still awaiting a response from when the threshold was 25 000 signatures. The most popular petition open right now, which may even be the most popular petition yet since the system’s inception, is a request for the Westboro Baptist Church to be legally recognized as a hate group. In the 30 days it had to collect signatures starting December 14, it gathered over 326 700 signatures, and is likely one of the most awaited responses on the system so far. The second and third most popular unanswered petitions also concern the Westboro Baptist Church, with the second (investigating the IRS tax-exempt status) collecting over 82 000 signatures and the third (combining the IRS tax-exempt status and the hate group classification) collecting over 75 900 signatures. It’s unsurprising that the church has attracted so much hatred as they actively spew hate towards homosexuals, soldiers and other religions amongst other groups. The timing of the petition with their decision to picket Sandy Hook Elementary School in support of the shooting likely assisted in the rapid increase in signatures.
Many have claimed that the responses received to petitions are more general acknowledgement of opinions versus suggestion of actual change, but allowing citizens to petition the government and receive responses from the current administration is a good step towards allowing citizens to have a stronger voice in their government. Indeed, if Canada only had a system similar to theirs, we would be able to more directly voice our displeasure with laws and acts in our own government.
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