How to Campaign Politically to Change a Law

Video Transcript

"Hi. This is Jim Goettler on behalf of Expert Village, and this is a video series about managing a political campaign. In this segment I'm going to touch on the process to run an initiative campaign, which is a quite different animal than running a campaign for a candidate, for political office. Most states, not all states, most states in the country and most provinces in Canada have a process by with the public, the individual citizens, can directly affect public policy through the initiative process. Now what this means is a group of people get together, and they decide they want to change a law. There are usually two ways to go about doing this. One is called an initiative to the people. And this means that you get enough poeple who agree with you to sign a petition or some form of a document, every state is different, that effectively changes the law. It is democracy at its most basic level and while people may have problems with it some way, some by the way it's carried out etc., it is democracy at its most basic level. Another kind of initiative campaign may involve what's called an initiative to the legislators. And again, each state and each province is defferent, but an initiative to the legislator is saying, essentially, 'We don't like the way you're doing your job. We want something done and we want to tell you how to do it, and we are going to all sign these petitions to force you to change a law or to change a policy,' that a group of people want to have changes. Now there have been many challenges with these things; people may not have alll their legal ducks in a row when they do this. But as far as the campaign itself, it's a different, again, than is a candidacy campaign, usually folks plug into initiative campaigns because they're advocates, as they really believe in an issue, they want to see the issue carred out in the public discourse, and by working together with others they decide to try to mount an initiative campaign. It's something where you can get your information on this at your Secretary of State's office, they usually have this very basic information. It's not a complex process, in most states it involves numbers of people who have signed petitions, which I'll get to in the next segment. Thank you."