White House raises the bar for petitions

The White House recently won over the nerd community with its response to a petition to build a Death Star, but not every submission to petitions.whitehouse.gov is quite so easy. And a rapidly growing number of petitions, serious and otherwise, have been hitting the response threshold on the "We the People" site.

So on the evening of Jan. 15, White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips announced that the new bar for a public response would be 100,000 signatures in 30 days.

Use of the petition site "more than doubled" in the last two months of 2012, Phillips wrote in a White House blog post. Noting that the threshold had been raised before, from 5,000 to 25,000, as more citizens began to participate, he wrote that this latest adjustment is "to ensure we're able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve."

Petitions posted before the announcement will not be held to the new standard.