White House Changes The Minimum Number Of Required Petition Signatures To 100,000

The "We the People" page on the White House website allows the public to create petitions, which, according to the previous rules, required a minimum of 25,000 signatures within 30 days to receive an official response. In response to the growing use of the service, however, the Obama administration has increased the minimum signature amount to 100,000. This news comes shortly after the popular petition for the construction of a Death Star was rejected.

This change has arisen as a result of increased activity on We the People. By doing so, the administration is ensuring that it can provide an official response to every petition that meets the signature requirements. This isn't the first time the minimum requirements have increased, with the original minimum signature amount in 2011 being only 5,000.

The White House's Digital Strategy Director Macon Phillips offered this statement. "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. This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist."

While many petitions have received an official response from the Obama administration, perhaps few were as popular as the Death Star petition, which hit the minimum signature mark the day before it was set to expire. The administration posted its response on January 12, stating that it wasn't the response we are looking for. Among other things, the administration wasn't keen on blowing up planets.

[via Daily Caller]