Harold Hubschman, Founder

The United States is one of the few countries in the world where citizens have the right to draft their own laws and put them directly on the ballot so the voters themselves can decide. Today this right is under attack by elected officials across the country who want to stop activists from using the citizen initiative process to propose and pass popular laws on their own. From increasing the number of signatures needed to get a question on the ballot, to restricting who is allowed to collect signatures, to regulating how petitioners are paid, opponents of the initiative process try to make it as hard and expensive as they can for citizens to put their ideas on the ballot.

I created this online platform to make it simple and inexpensive for activists to put good laws on the ballot when their legislators refuse to act. For nearly three decades my firm SignatureDrive.com has been running large and geographically complex signature drives, here in Massachusetts where we are based and in other states, for well-funded organizations, industry PACs and wealthy individuals. Together with my two very excellent business partners and our extremely talented managers and elite petitioners around the country, we’ve collectively run over 100 statewide signature drives (all of them successful) for ballot initiatives and candidates in 26 states. 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 mobilize the army of volunteers it takes to collect enough signatures to get a statewide initiative on the ballot. Most campaigns have no choice but to hire a professional signature drive firm.

I am lucky to have had clients with the financial resources to put their initiatives on the ballot. But many activists and their important ideas are shut out of the debate because the process is so expensive that only wealthy organizations or individuals can afford to hire a professional signature drive firm. I built this website to make the ballot initiative process accessible to groups with popular issues but limited financial resources.

The idea is simple. We can eliminate the enormous cost of running a conventional signature drive by using social media and crowdsourcing to build an online community of 100,000 Massachusetts voters who are interested in supporting progressive ballot initiatives and who are willing to contribute $3 to cover the expense of collecting and processing their signature. This includes the cost of printing the petition, mailing it out and retrieving it, getting the signature certified by the signer’s city or town election department, and finally getting it delivered to the Secretary of State.

If we can recruit 100,000 progressive voters to sign this climate change petition, and who want to be notified in subsequent years when activists are proposing other progressive initiatives, we can remove the huge financial barrier that keeps most activists groups from putting their grassroots ideas on the ballot. And once we’ve built our online community of progressive petition signers, in addition to waiting for outside activists to propose their ideas, we can continue to grow our group, and after determining which issues we think are most important, put one of those on the ballot.

We are beginning with this initiative to pass a Green New Deal for Massachusetts. The Talmud says that “it is not your duty to finish the work of perfecting the world, but neither are you at liberty to do nothing.” Solving the climate change crisis is an enormous undertaking, beyond the ability of any one person. But we are not at liberty to do nothing. By simply signing this petition, and once the law is passed by converting our individual car and home to clean energy, each of us has the power to make the problem a little bit smaller. And together we can all make the problem a lot smaller.