Possible Reasons for Not Signing a Petition

A petition is intended as an influence for the authorities to make the right judgment and the right decisions that would benefit everyone concerned. A petition needs a significant amount of signatures and should get at least 100% of the required percentage of signatures as decided by the legislatures. The percentage of signatures required may be as low as 1% of the total population or as high as 51% of the total population depending on the number of people in the community or group that will be affected when the petition is approved or denied.

Petitions need signatures but what if there won’t be any signatures on your petition? There must be a reason for this and you must understand that there are different reasons why people choose not to sign the petition. Their reasons may vary but you have to take into consideration the different possible reasons for people not to sign.

First, you must consider whether or not the petition will truly benefit the majority or will it just benefit yourself. People may read the petition and think that it won’t really make a difference in their lives and so they opt not to include their names in it. Remember, the petition is a legal document and once you signed it, you are legally bound to it.

Second, the petition may be boring. People are busy and when they checked out the petition and got bored in the process, they may end up disregarding it and choose not to sign. You must solve this by making the petition brief yet complete so that the readers would get the point quickly and decide to sign it once convinced of the petition’s good purpose.

Third, people may think their signature won’t make a difference. If you need thousands of signatures for the petition, some may think they can just leave it to the other people and won’t spend a few seconds to sign their names on it. We can’t disregard this because many really think they’re just one person and their signatures won’t count. But, each person must contribute so you must convince them that every signature counts especially when the amount of signatures required is by the thousands because then you’d need all the signatures you can get.

Lastly, people may be scared to sign. You can’t really force a person to sign the petition especially if the petition is touching a very delicate matter. It is a legal document and once they’ve signed it, they are legally becoming a part of the petition. This may really scare some people especially when the petition is concerning other people in lower positions that may represent an individual group as well. For example, a petition against the country’s president where signatories are the congressmen. Each signature make such a big impact that it may scare other congressmen to sign it because their signature may affect them in a negative way. You still must convince the people concerned to sign the petition and not be scared because it’s for the greater good anyway.