About a decade ago, I worked collecting signatures for ballot initiatives in California. I worked with a company which contracted with organizations that financially sponsored the ballot initiatives. At the time I was doing it, the sponsor would usually pay from between $1 to $4 per signature. I would stand in an area with lots of foot traffic and try to persuade passerby to sign my petitions. To maximize profits, the typical strategy is to order petitions from highest-paying to lowest-paying, and try to get any given passerby to sign as many petitions as possible. People who sign your petitions need to be registered voters, so if you're on e.g. a college campus with lots of people who aren't registered voters, you can carry voter registration forms in order to register them. But that strategy is more time-consuming and therefore less profitable. There is a process to randomly verify that petition signatories are registered voters to prevent fraud.

I got into this business because a friend of mine said it could be a good way to make extra cash if you find a good place to stand, and a good way to practice charisma. I got out of it because I wasn't making all that much money, and I was worried that bothering people who were just trying to go about their day was making me callous.

California's current petition system seems like a pretty clear perversion of whatever the designers had in mind. I barely remember having any sort of substantial discussion regarding the policy merits of the petitions I was collecting signatures for. The guy who ran the petition company freely admitted to collecting petitions for initiatives he didn't believe in, and said his most effective tactic for collecting a signatures was to emphasize that "this just puts it on the ballot". There was only one time I ever remember a lady who said "This sounds like bad policy so I'm not signing". I respected the heck out of that, even though her reasoning didn't persuade me. (I believe I was trying to collect her signature for the current top-paying petition related to minutiae of car insurance law.)

So overall, I agree that if you just want to put a petition on the ballot as efficiently as possible, and you have the money needed to hire contractors, then that's a good way to go. But I am also not terminally cynicism-pilled. Based on my insider knowledge of the system, I don't see any reason in principle why a group couldn't use the law more like it was intended.

Yes, collecting half a million signatures is a big project. Imagine 1000 volunteers, each committed enough to collect an average of 500 signatures each. But starting a mass movement is also a big project. So if you want to start a mass movement anyways, you might consider combining those objectives, and using contractors to make up any signature shortfall.

The AI Pause protests I've seen haven't struck me as very effective. I remember in the early days, some EAs were claiming that attending early Pause protests would be high impact, if the protests grew over time. Despite the poll numbers, the Pause protests don't seem to be growing much beyond the core EA/LW audience. If growing those protests is a goal, and a mass movement is considered desirable (a big "if", obviously), maybe it's time to embrace the grind and put in the same sort of leg work you see with e.g. vegan activism.

So -- I'm not suggesting volunteer signature collection as a substitute for professional signature collection, so much as I am suggesting volunteer signature collection as a substitute for doing protests. The Pause movement might see more growth if volunteers split off into groups of two and tried to talk to passerby about AI on an individual basis. AI is a hot topic, much hotter than car insurance law, and the hypothesis that passerby are interested in having 1-on-1 conversations about it may be worth cheap testing. Petitioning could serve as an excuse to start conversations which would ideally end in a signature, a mailing list signup, or a new committed volunteer.

I can share more strategy thoughts if people are interested.