Comment by cjoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjoh | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Petitions are completely ineffective because the citizenry doesn't have enough civic knowledge to ask for the right things.

Take for instance, the top one -- "classify the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group" or the various succession petitions. Is there a federal agency that regulates hate groups? Or classifies who is a hate group and who is not? No. "Hate Group" is a label used by the private NGO sector -- in this case the ADL and SPLC (two non-governmental organizations) maintain lists of hate groups.

Nor does one "incorporate" via the federal government. You incorporate in a state. Stripping Westboro of their tax exempt status should be the lead ask there, and yet those petitions are far less popular than the original? Why? Because it's a more severe ask.

Same with "recount the election" -- the federal government doesn't count votes!

Restrict pay for senators? Seriously, c'mon. We all learned about separation of powers, right?

Petitions do work. What a lobbyist does is petition the government. They're just professional at it, and why we presume that a developer or a plumber or a chicken farmer should be as good of a lobbyist as a professional lobbyist is, is beyond me.

Petitions work. But there's a lot more to getting petitions to affect change than writing some nonsense on a web page and getting a bunch of people to agree with you. Is the expectation that if .01% of the US Population clicks a +1 button on a website then the federal government will change a law? That's a scary proposition.

"Petitions do work. What a lobbyist does is petition the government. They're just professional at it, and why we presume that a developer or a plumber or a chicken farmer should be as good of a lobbyist as a professional lobbyist is, is beyond me."

As much as I think lobbying is a great harm to the system, I can't help but wonder. Would it be effective if there were some sort of "Kickstarter" for lobbying that would allow the mass public participate in a particular lobbying effort with their own $.

Think "We the people" but backed by people who wish to affect change in a particular way with a small "donation". The difference would be that each project would need to be curated by a professional lobbyist to ensure that the details are correct. There could be a threshold set and a particular lobbying effort would only move forward if the threshold is met... Etc, etc, just like Kickstarter. I can't help but think that I'm being too simplistic and overly optimistic. Is there any particular reason this wouldn't work?

They're called PACs :p (different than Super PACs) but it would be interesting if someone took the Kickstarter approach to one. Not sure if they would run into a bunch of legal troubles, because PACs are heavily regulated.

It would probably work.

It wouldn't be as simple as Kickstarter, however:

US public policy already favors the wealthy. (Oligarchy) If the ability to participate in the government was predicated on spending some cash, the system would eventually turn into a Feudal state. This is why poll taxes are outlawed: the government cannot require you to pay to vote.

I agree, but I think that's where we're seeing this particular system go:

The petitions that generate notable interest are increasingly those who are written or championed by people who do have a better-than-baseline grasp on how the government works and what to ask for. The petition to dismiss Swartz's prosecutors is a good example. That's something aimed at the right place, asking for the right thing (to indicate the severity of the citizenry's reaction to the (mis)conduct) and really only getting traction because people who grok the system are promoting that petition in the general interest stories/blogs that initially revealed that misconduct and stoked the citizen response.

Particularly as they raise the threshold for response to reflect the total crowd using the site, I think we'll see the 'qualifying' petitions largely become those that are written/championed by -- for lack of a better term -- special interest groups of citizens.

There are a few people doing effective, targeted activism on tech issues in Silicon Valley (not enough, but a few). If this is your interest, PLEASE contact me. We're rolling out a south bay meetup in a couple weeks, and we could use volunteers around the country as well.

Our group includes people with experience getting real bills past the House. It's a chance to stop debating which strategies make a difference and make a difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com