Knowing the Petition Process for Political Campaigns

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jim Goettler on behalf of Expert Village and this is a video series about managing a political campaign. Right now I am going to talk a little about the petition process as it applies to the initiatives if you want to run a initiative campaign. A petition process, you need to go through in order to get a valid initiative up and running. Most states, now keep in mind, every state has its own rules and you are going to have to become very conversed in the rules in each state, obviously the one you are working in. Most states have a process by which x number of signatures will put an initiative on the ballot. You've often probably seen folks standing out at bus stops, and train stations or the airport with petition boards. Many states, not all states, many states allow what are called "paid petition gatherers". I told people I was involved with a very successful environmental petition many years ago, there was a valid initiative where I lived. And it basically cost money per signature to get the initiative on the ballot. The hard case I think we were paying about seventy five cents per signature. Now yes, it's not the perfect way of doing things. The ideal is that people simply ban together and sign the petition. The reality is that it costs, it takes so many signatures, as a rule, to get on the ballot, that the only way that successful ones happen are through paid signatures gatherers. I don't like it, but that's the way it is. The exception to that nationally is the humane society or organizations that have huge databases. If you need to get, for instance, two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand names, on a petition, you either have to have a database that allows you to reach these folks directly or you need to go out and reach the random folks in the streets and in the neighborhoods, which is going to require unfortunately a paid signature gatherer. Now there are companies around the country that do this. This is what their niche is, they help organizations get those signatures and they obviously take money to do it. Again, it's not the ideal situation but it is unfortunately how it works and how it gets things on the ballot. We can go over on how to change that process, but right now we have to work with what we have is what we have. The next segment I'm going to touch on is developing a stat for a campaign, being an initiative campaign or a campaign for a candidate for a public office. "