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people have taken the message to the White House form ← back to the message
One message is one message. A visible, growing number is what persuades the next person that it's worth two minutes of their time. That's all this site does: hold the message, make it easy to send, and keep the count.
It makes it an honest estimate rather than an audited figure. Nobody outside the White House can see what arrives through its form, so no site can verify sends; petition sites, "call your representative" tools and pledge campaigns all work the same way. We count at the moment a person copies the message and presses the button that opens the form, because on a phone the form takes over the screen and there is no reliable way to come back and report afterwards. Some people will reach the form and not finish, so the number is best read as "people who set out to send this," which is still the thing worth knowing. We limit each visitor to one count per day, count only presses from within the United States (anyone may send the message; presses from abroad are thanked but not counted), run a human check on the press, and label the number for exactly what it is.
William Reed, a retired pediatric hematologist in Oakland, California, as a private citizen. No party, campaign, organization or donor is involved. The costs are a domain name and web hosting, paid personally. The complete source code is public, so you don't have to take any of this on trust.
The message was written to be something people across party lines can sign, and it says what we want rather than what we're against. Polling suggests that most of its points have majority support in both parties; the figures are below.
Nothing that identifies you. The site keeps the count and a handful of running totals (page views and button clicks, as plain numbers) so we can see roughly what share of visitors go on to send the message. There are no cookies, accounts, analytics services or third-party scripts, other than Cloudflare's human check on the button. For abuse prevention, when you press the button the server keeps a one-way, salted hash of your internet address for 24 hours so the same connection isn't counted twice in a day; the address itself is never stored, the hash is deleted after a day, and the salt changes daily so hashes can't be linked across days. Each press's country of origin, supplied by Cloudflare, is checked so that only presses from within the US count; it is compared, not stored. Server access logging is off. The White House form you fill in belongs to the White House; this site never sees it. The running totals are public at /api/stats.
Please do. A message in your own words carries more weight than a copy. The count is for messages broadly along these lines, not identical ones.
Because it's the conventional, respectful form of address for the office, whoever holds it, and the message is meant to be respectful.
Small wording changes are listed in the history at the bottom of this page, with dates. The count is never reset for a wording change; it includes everyone who sent an earlier version.
The form itself says messages are captured and archived under the Presidential Records Act. Whether anyone reads them is not something we can know. What we do know is that a large, visible number of citizens saying the same thing is harder to ignore than one, which is the premise of the count.
Pollsters ask their own questions, not ours, so each figure below is the closest recent measurement we could find, with the source. We'd rather show the numbers than claim a single percentage for the message as a whole, which nobody has polled.
Paste this one line anywhere on a web page. It shows the live count, the message, and the same three steps, inside a small frame served from this site.
Everything that runs this site is public: Source code on GitHub. The server side is about two hundred lines.