Petition

Petitions are commonly used in the U.S. to qualify candidates for public office to appear on a ballot; while anyone can be a write-in candidate, a candidate desiring that his or her name appear on printed ballots and other official election materials must gather a certain number of valid signatures from registered voters. In jurisdictions whose laws allow for ballot initiatives, the gathering of a sufficient number of voter signatures qualifies a proposed initiative to be placed on the ballot. The 2003 California recall election, which culminated in the recall of Governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, began when U.S. Representative Darrell Issa employed paid signature gatherers who obtained millions of signatures at a cost to Issa of millions of dollars. Once the requisite number of signatures was obtained on the recall petition, other petitions were circulated by would-be candidates who wanted to appear on the ballot as possible replacements for Davis. After that step, a vote on the recall was scheduled.

Other types of petitions include those that sought to free Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment by the former apartheid government of South Africa. The petitions had no legal effect, but the signatures of millions of people on the petitions represented a moral force that may have helped free Mandela and end apartheid. Non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International often use petitions in an attempt to exert moral authority in support of various causes. Other nongovernmental subjects of petition drives include corporate personnel decisions. In the United Kingdom, a petition to the parliament in 1990 against ambulance service cuts attracted 4.5 million signatures. Today, petitions in Britain are often presented through the UK Parliament petitions website, the forerunner of which was set up in 2006. Such online petitions are a new form of a petition becoming commonplace in the 21st century. Change.org was founded in 2007 and became the world's most popular online petition platform with around 50 million registered users.

Recent research by the sociocultural psychologist, Chana Etengoff, has highlighted the therapeutic benefits of petitioning including meaning-making, social action, agency and empowerment.