Why Petitions Are Ignored
It is commonly said that ordinary people have no way to be heard. The opposite is true. There have never been more channels for passing an opinion upwards: petitions, letters, hearings, public comment, polls, social networks. The channels are not the shortage. What is missing is proof: that the signatures were put there by living people, that each of them spoke once, that the number means what it says.
The count is broken
A petition with a million names is a claim about a million people. Nobody can check it. A platform that lets anyone sign in seconds lets one person sign a thousand times and lets a script sign a million. Once that is known, and it is known, every count from every such channel can be dismissed for free, and the genuine voices are dismissed together with the manufactured ones. The largest public comment procedures of recent years have been shown to consist mostly of fakes, and the honest comments lost their value with them.
That is why a civic voice can be ignored. Not because those in power are evil, but because nothing obliges them to believe the number. A count that cannot be verified is an assertion, and an assertion is cheap to set aside.
What a count would need
The task of being impossible to ignore without holding any power has been solved before, by ratings, by scientific panels, by standards bodies, by citizens' assemblies. From such cases a short list of properties can be read off. The instrument must produce something that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Its procedure must be visible in full. It must work regularly, so that results can be compared over time. It must be usable by all sides alike, or it is a weapon rather than infrastructure. And it must be known who is counted: that living, unique people stand behind the number, each of whom spoke once and of their own will.
The last property is the one petitions, polls and social networks all lack, and without it the others do not help. The Earthlings people was built, before anything else, to have it.
A measuring instrument, not another megaphone
The Earthlings people is not one more way of speaking out. It is an attempt to build a measuring instrument: a procedure by which a question is put to confirmed, unique, living people and their answers are published in a form that anyone, including an opponent, can recount.
Current technology makes this possible for the first time. A person can be confirmed to be one real human being without anyone learning who they are. A vote can be tied to that person so that it cannot be bought, accumulated or transferred. The count can be published so that it is checked rather than believed. That is a society of trust in the precise sense: no one has to trust anyone, because everyone can verify.
The instrument is a procedure, not the people who answer it. No person is measured; each answers or does not, and the answer belongs to them. And the people that builds the instrument has no power over anyone, including over its own members: it has no office from which to command, and its principles forbid creating one.
Why it takes a people
A company or a foundation could build the verification faster and more cheaply. What it could not answer is the question that follows every count: who authorized you to speak for these people. A people answers it by its nature. Its members have mutually acknowledged their belonging, and what the instrument measures is their own will, presented on their own behalf. Verifiability without mutual recognition yields statistics; mutual recognition without verifiability yields a petition. Together they yield what has not existed until now.
Details of the cases, the properties and the procedure are in the document Civic Voice.
Questions
Isn't this just a better petition platform?
A petition platform counts clicks. This counts people who have been confirmed, once each, to be one living human being, and publishes the count so that it can be recounted without trusting the publisher.
Can it force anyone to act?
No, and it does not try. The people speaks, appeals and objects and never compels. Its force is the force of a number that cannot be dismissed.
What does it measure?
Whatever question its members decide to put, under rules that are published in advance. The first measurement is the vote on the founding text itself.
The founding period is open
The founding period of the Earthlings people is open. The founding documents may be changed by anyone, and the Declaration will be adopted by a vote of confirmed living people, counted once each. See The Founding Period.
The full argument
The document Civic Voice examines the cases, the five properties of a measuring instrument, and how a measurement is conducted.