Tuesday, January 15, 2013

White House Raises Response Threshold On Petition Website

Posted By on Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 5:47 PM

We've had a lot of fun talking about online petitions here in the past, from the stupid petition to deport Piers Morgan, to the stupid petitions to secede, to the good-natured petition to create a male-friendy Easy Bake Oven (though the last one was hosted on change.org, for clarity's sake).

Well, the White House is going to make it a bit more difficult for people to trouble them with petitions for building a Death Star; as of today, the number of signatures needed within 30 days to secure a response from the White House is 100,000.

From the White House:

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. 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.

So it makes sense that they're raising the threshold again (the original requirement was just 5,000 signatures); people are aware of the site, so popular petitions explode.

We'll see how many petitions get through now—hopefully, we'll see a shortage of people asking for both secession and planet-destroying space stations alike.

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