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Change.org tries to shame unresponsive elected officials [1]
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Date: 2025-05-23
Signing petitions is still an important form of activism, even as we despair that the government officials and corporate executives just completely ignore the petitions we send them. It’s as if they’re too lazy to even say “I’ll think about it.”
Decision makers do occasionally respond to petitions. The folks at Change.org have decided to help people track decision makers’ responsiveness with public responsiveness scores.
Two months ago, I signed a petition to Detroit’s City Council which got almost three hundred signatures. The council is to the mayor as the state legislature is to the governor, or as Congress is to the president.
Councilman Coleman Young II is one of nine members of City Council, he’s an at-large member, rather than for any specific district. A couple of days ago, Change.org sent me a letter about him.
Hi Alonso , My name is Nicolas and I am on the team here at Change.org. Nice to meet you! I’m reaching out because you recently signed a petition directed at Councilman Coleman Young. We’ve just launched a new tool on Change.org that tracks how responsive elected officials like Mayor Manheimer [of Asheville, North Carolina, an incumbent Democrat] are to petitions that have strong community support. And, Councilman Coleman Young's Responsiveness Score is now public. This score reflects whether your mayor is actively engaging with the issues that matter most to constituents. You can view it here!
Councilman Young has a responsiveness score of 0%. That sounds about right. Maybe this will shame him to be more responsive. Or maybe he’s too much of a goofy bastard to be shamed.
Probably every time I’ve gone to a City Council meeting, Young shows up late. I’m no paragon of punctuality myself, but if I was a councilmember, I’d try to show up at roll call. I have never seen the roll call take place precisely on the hour, it is almost always several minutes past the announced starting time anyway, and most of the other councilmembers show up in time for the roll call.
Also in this hypothetical, I’d be mindful of the need for quorum. And if I absolutely had to be late, at least I would make sure I understand what is being discussed before chiming in with questions that are best irrelevant and at worst inappropriate. If Young wastes enough time getting caught up to speed, maybe public comment can be abbreviated to thirty seconds. Some councilmembers sure would like that.
It seems to me that Councilman Young regards his position as a member of City Council as a birthright sinecure (his father, Coleman A. Young, was mayor for twenty years, winning re-election four times). If Young Jr. doesn’t need to be on time for roll call, he doesn’t need to respond to Change.org petitions.
Eventually, City Council did as the petition asked. But none of the other councilmembers responded to Change.org either, such as, for example, the brilliantly deceitful District 6 Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero, whose Change.org page doesn’t show a responsiveness score as of today.
One of Santiago-Romero’s staffers sent me a graphic that purported to prove that the councilwoman did respond to the petition which I publicly asserted she ignored. I put as much stock in that as I do in the picture of Pope Donald Trump. And, more importantly, it counts for diddly-squat on Change.org.
Before Change.org’s letter, I had never heard of Mayor Manheimer. I had to look her up on Ballotpedia. In her case, her Change.org page turned out to be a lot more informative. As of today, it shows a responsiveness score of 50%, she responded to one of the two petitions she’s gotten which has garnered more than a hundred signatures.
That threshold of number of signatures figures into the calculation. For example, Mayor Manheimer has gotten four Change.org petitions, but only two of them got more than a hundred signatures, so they count for the calculation while the other two do not. She responded through Change.org to the petition with almost a thousand signatures. One out of two qualifying petitions results in a responsiveness score of 50%.
Contrast that to Councilman Young, who’s gotten nine Change.org petitions, with four of them getting more than a hundred signatures. Young didn’t respond through Change.org to the petition with more than thirty thousand signatures, he didn’t respond to the one with 119 signatures nor any of the other ones. No responses on the qualifying petitions gives a responsiveness score of 0%.
I’m sure some elected officials will want to improve their responsiveness scores on Change.org. They can learn how to do that by getting in touch with Change.org by phone or e-mail.
But perhaps the main value of these responsiveness scores will be as another data point for voters. Like, for example, Councilman Young, since you can’t be bothered to show up to City Council meetings on time or respond to Change.org petitions, maybe you should be relieved of both obligations.
Maybe Shakira Hawkins, to pick a candidate at random, might be more responsive to Change.org petitions, and to citizens making public comment at City Council meetings, and in general.
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