Who we are and why we're doing this
Harold Hubschman, Founder
The United States is one of the few countries in the world where voters have the right to propose their own laws and then pass them by popular vote on election day. Today this right is under attack by elected officials in most states around the country who want to prevent activists from using the citizen initiative process to propose and pass popular laws on their own. From increasing the number of signatures needed to put a question on the ballot, to dictating to campaigns which petitioners are allowed to collect their signatures, to regulating the way those petitioners can be paid, opponents of the initiative process are making it as hard and expensive as possible for voters to put their ideas on the ballot.
For nearly three decades my firm SignatureDrive.com has been running large geographically complex signature drives, here in Massachusetts where we are based and in other states. My two business partners and I, and our very talented managers and elite petitioners around the country, have collectively run over 100 statewide signature drives (all of them successful) in 26 states, for ballot initiatives and for candidates at all levels, from city council and mayoral races to presidential contests. We’ve collected over 5.5 million signatures.
I know firsthand exactly how hard and expensive it is to get even the most popular issues on the ballot. A vanishingly small number of campaigns are able to collect the tens or hundreds of thousands of signatures needed for a statewide initiative using only volunteers. Most campaigns need the help of a professional signature drive firm like ours to hire what we call clipboard commandos, paid petitioners who stand in front of supermarkets with clipboards, collecting signatures for weeks or months at a time. The high cost of running a paid signature drive puts this option out of reach of all but the best funded campaigns. This means that many activists and their important ideas are shut out of the debate entirely.
I created this online platform to make it easier for activists to put good laws on the ballot when their legislators refuse to act. Our goal is to make the ballot initiative process accessible to activists and organizations who are trying to advance important issues but have limited financial resources.
The idea is simple. We are going to eliminate the prohibitively high cost of hiring an army of clipboard commandos by using social media and crowdsourcing to create and mobilize an online community of voters who want to sign initiative petitions to help get good ideas on the ballot. We will ask each signer to contribute just $2.95 to cover what it costs us to collect and process all the signatures on a petition sheet. (This process is described in detail on the “About” and “Rules” pages.) If everyone in a household signs, we still only need one donation of $2.95 to process the entire petition sheet and all of its signatures.Â
Our goal is to finance our signature drives entirely with contributions from our actual signers themselves. This frees us from being dependent on special interest funding to get our initiatives on the ballot. In fact, for us to even be able to take on an initiative, it will need to have the support of a large enough base of grassroots signers for us to be able to get it on the ballot with only their signatures and their $2.95 contributions. In effect, we are “democratizing” direct democracy by putting the capability of financing initiatives into the hands of activists and voters.
We decided to launch this project with a ballot initiative in Massachusetts because we’re based in Massachusetts where it’s easier for us to keep the price of running a signature drive down until we perfect our system. And we chose an initiative for a law to suspend the gas tax until the price drops below $2 per gallon because we want to avoid fringe wedge issues and focus on mainstream common sense initiatives, such as suspending the gas tax, that have widespread bipartisan support, and because our legislators refuse to touch it, even though their constituents, who are struggling with the burden of skyrocketing inflation, are desperate for gas tax relief.
Our ultimate goal is to recruit signers in other ballot initiative states so we can help activists in those states pass their own laws. After we have gas tax relief on the ballot in Massachusetts, we will look at passing it in other states. We will also look at other issues, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, that have popular support. Once we have a large enough community of signers we will ask them which specific laws they would like to see enacted and pursue one or more of those if there is enough support in our online community of signers to get those issues on the ballot. And if we don’t have enough signers, we will continue to recruit signers until we do.
So will you help launch this new tool to put important issues on the ballot? Do you want people to be able to vote on our initiative to suspend the gas tax? Then please contribute $2.95 so we can send you the petition. If enough people sign our petition, we can put our proposed law to suspend the gas tax on the ballot, and build this game changing platform for future citizen initiatives.
Who we are and why we're doing this
Harold Hubschman, Founder
The United States is one of the few countries in the world where voters have the right to propose their own laws and then pass them by popular vote on election day. Today this right is under attack by elected officials in most states around the country who want to prevent activists from using the citizen initiative process to propose and pass popular laws on their own. From increasing the number of signatures needed to put a question on the ballot, to dictating to campaigns which petitioners are allowed to collect their signatures, to regulating the way those petitioners can be paid, opponents of the initiative process are making it as hard and expensive as possible for voters to put their ideas on the ballot.
For nearly three decades my firm SignatureDrive.com has been running large geographically complex signature drives, here in Massachusetts where we are based and in other states. My two business partners and I, and our very talented managers and elite petitioners around the country, have collectively run over 100 statewide signature drives (all of them successful) in 26 states, for ballot initiatives and for candidates at all levels, from city council and mayoral races to presidential contests. We’ve collected over 5.5 million signatures.
I know firsthand exactly how hard and expensive it is to get even the most popular issues on the ballot. A vanishingly small number of campaigns are able to collect the tens or hundreds of thousands of signatures needed for a statewide initiative using only volunteers. Most campaigns need the help of a professional signature drive firm like ours to hire what we call clipboard commandos, paid petitioners who stand in front of supermarkets with clipboards, collecting signatures for weeks or months at a time. The high cost of running a paid signature drive puts this option out of reach of all but the best funded campaigns. This means that many activists and their important ideas are shut out of the debate entirely.
I created this online platform to make it easier for activists to put good laws on the ballot when their legislators refuse to act. Our goal is to make the ballot initiative process accessible to activists and organizations who are trying to advance important issues but have limited financial resources.
The idea is simple. We are going to eliminate the prohibitively high cost of hiring an army of clipboard commandos by using social media and crowdsourcing to create and mobilize an online community of voters who want to sign initiative petitions to help get good ideas on the ballot. We will ask each signer to contribute just $2.95 to cover what it costs us to collect and process all the signatures on a petition sheet. (This process is described in detail on the “About” and “Rules” pages.) If everyone in a household signs, we still only need one donation of $2.95 to process the entire petition sheet and all of its signatures.Â
Our goal is to finance our signature drives entirely with contributions from our actual signers themselves. This frees us from being dependent on special interest funding to get our initiatives on the ballot. In fact, for us to even be able to take on an initiative, it will need to have the support of a large enough base of grassroots signers for us to be able to get it on the ballot with only their signatures and their $2.95 contributions. In effect, we are “democratizing” direct democracy by putting the capability of financing initiatives into the hands of activists and voters.
We decided to launch this project with a ballot initiative in Massachusetts because we’re based in Massachusetts where it’s easier for us to keep the price of running a signature drive down until we perfect our system. And we chose an initiative for a law to suspend the gas tax until the price drops below $2 per gallon because we want to avoid fringe wedge issues and focus on mainstream common sense initiatives, such as suspending the gas tax, that have widespread bipartisan support, and because our legislators refuse to touch it, even though their constituents, who are struggling with the burden of skyrocketing inflation, are desperate for gas tax relief.
Our ultimate goal is to recruit signers in other ballot initiative states so we can help activists in those states pass their own laws. After we have gas tax relief on the ballot in Massachusetts, we will look at passing it in other states. We will also look at other issues, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, that have popular support. Once we have a large enough community of signers we will ask them which specific laws they would like to see enacted and pursue one or more of those if there is enough support in our online community of signers to get those issues on the ballot. And if we don’t have enough signers, we will continue to recruit signers until we do.
So will you help launch this new tool to put important issues on the ballot? Do you want people to be able to vote on our initiative to suspend the gas tax? Then please contribute $2.95 so we can send you the petition. If enough people sign our petition, we can put our proposed law to suspend the gas tax on the ballot, and build this game changing platform for future citizen initiatives.
Who we are and why we’re doing this
Harold Hubschman, Founder
The United States is one of the few countries in the world where voters have the right to propose their own laws and then pass them by popular vote on election day. Today this right is under attack by elected officials in most states around the country who want to prevent activists from using the citizen initiative process to propose and pass popular laws on their own. From increasing the number of signatures needed to put a question on the ballot, to dictating to campaigns which petitioners are allowed to collect their signatures, to regulating the way those petitioners can be paid, opponents of the initiative process are making it as hard and expensive as possible for voters to put their ideas on the ballot.
For nearly three decades my firm SignatureDrive.com has been running large geographically complex signature drives, here in Massachusetts where we are based and in other states. My two business partners and I, and our very talented managers and elite petitioners around the country, have collectively run over 100 statewide signature drives (all of them successful) in 26 states, for ballot initiatives and for candidates at all levels, from city council and mayoral races to presidential contests. We’ve collected over 5.5 million signatures.
I know firsthand exactly how hard and expensive it is to get even the most popular issues on the ballot. A vanishingly small number of campaigns are able to collect the tens or hundreds of thousands of signatures needed for a statewide initiative using only volunteers. Most campaigns need the help of a professional signature drive firm like ours to hire what we call clipboard commandos, paid petitioners who stand in front of supermarkets with clipboards, collecting signatures for weeks or months at a time. The high cost of running a paid signature drive puts this option out of reach of all but the best funded campaigns. This means that many activists and their important ideas are shut out of the debate entirely.
I created this online platform to make it easier for activists to put good laws on the ballot when their legislators refuse to act. Our goal is to make the ballot initiative process accessible to activists and organizations who are trying to advance important issues but have limited financial resources.
The idea is simple. We are going to eliminate the prohibitively high cost of hiring an army of clipboard commandos by using social media and crowdsourcing to create and mobilize an online community of voters who want to sign initiative petitions to help get good ideas on the ballot. We will ask each signer to contribute just $2.95 to cover what it costs us to collect and process all the signatures on a petition sheet. (This process is described in detail on the “About” and “Rules” pages.) If everyone in a household signs, we still only need one donation of $2.95 to process the entire petition sheet and all of its signatures.Â
Our goal is to finance our signature drives entirely with contributions from our actual signers themselves. This frees us from being dependent on special interest funding to get our initiatives on the ballot. In fact, for us to even be able to take on an initiative, it will need to have the support of a large enough base of grassroots signers for us to be able to get it on the ballot with only their signatures and their $2.95 contributions. In effect, we are “democratizing” direct democracy by putting the capability of financing initiatives into the hands of activists and voters.
We decided to launch this project with a ballot initiative in Massachusetts because we’re based in Massachusetts where it’s easier for us to keep the price of running a signature drive down until we perfect our system. And we chose an initiative for a law to suspend the gas tax until the price drops below $2 per gallon because we want to avoid fringe wedge issues and focus on mainstream common sense initiatives, such as suspending the gas tax, that have widespread bipartisan support, and because our legislators refuse to touch it, even though their constituents, who are struggling with the burden of skyrocketing inflation, are desperate for gas tax relief.
Our ultimate goal is to recruit signers in other ballot initiative states so we can help activists in those states pass their own laws. After we have gas tax relief on the ballot in Massachusetts, we will look at passing it in other states. We will also look at other issues, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, that have popular support. Once we have a large enough community of signers we will ask them which specific laws they would like to see enacted and pursue one or more of those if there is enough support in our online community of signers to get those issues on the ballot. And if we don’t have enough signers, we will continue to recruit signers until we do.
So will you help launch this new tool to put important issues on the ballot? Do you want people to be able to vote on our initiative to suspend the gas tax? Then please contribute $2.95 so we can send you the petition. If enough people sign our petition, we can put our proposed law to suspend the gas tax on the ballot, and build this game changing platform for future citizen initiatives.