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The White House Is Ignoring a Bunch of Petitions, and This Site Tracks Them

There’s a new single-serving site that lets you know which We The People online petitions the White House is ignoring. Since the We The People site launched back in 2011, it has seen 232 petitio...
The White House Is Ignoring a Bunch of Petitions, and This Site Tracks Them
Written by Josh Wolford
  • There’s a new single-serving site that lets you know which We The People online petitions the White House is ignoring.

    Since the We The People site launched back in 2011, it has seen 232 petitions meet their signature threshold (5,000 at first, increased to 25,000 and then 100,000 as the site gained popularity). In that time, the White House has officially responded to 202 of them (87%).

    That means that there are a few dozen petitions that the White House has ignored, despite that fact that they’ve met their signature threshold. And you can track them all via WHPetitions.info.

    I noted the fact that the White House had a bunch of forgotten petitions back in December of last year. At that time, I counted 48 threshold-reaching petitions without official responses. The White House has been called out for ignoring so many successful petitions. A couple of months ago, they actually responded to a petition on the site that asked the administration to “actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening.”

    “We’re listening. Seriously,” said Director of the Office of Digital Strategy and Obama special assistant Macon Phillips.

    “From the beginning, we promised that every petition that crosses the signature threshold will be reviewed by policy experts in the Administration. Each of the 97 petitions that have crossed the signature threshold so far have been carefully reviewed by experts here at the White House and in agencies across the federal government, and the majority have already been answered, with more coming every week,” he said.

    But there are still a substantial number of petitions that have crossed their signature threshold and have yet to receive an official response from the White House. According to the new petition tracking site, that number is 30.

    Many of these are petitions that broke a lower signature threshold – 5,000 or 25,000. Most of these are over a year old. Don’t hold your breath on responses to those. But there are 7 petitions that have crossed the newest threshold of 100,000 signatures and are still unanswered.

    • We ask American Congress to make The Act of Alexander Dolmatov to punish all Dutch officials responsible for his death.
    • Invest and deport Jasmine Sun who was the main suspect of a famous Thallium poison murder case (victim:Zhu Lin) in China.
    • Democracy crisis in Malaysia: foreign workers were employed for fraud voting in Malaysian General Election.
    • Provide necessary assistance to prevent Taiwanese people from being murdered by Philippines and rebuild friendship.
    • Allow Tesla Motors to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states.
    • Pardon Edward Snowden.
    • Declare Muslim Brotherhood organization as a terrorist group.

    If the White House is to be believed, they have people reviewing these specific petitions and we can expect some sort of response at some point in the future. But most of these petitions are more than two months old. It appears that there are some topics that the White House would like to shy away from, no matter how many signatures a petition receives.

    [h/t Daily Dot]

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