Advanced Micro Targeting

Petition Companies

Advanced Micro Targeting is a company that offers signature gathering services to ballot initiative campaigns.

About

Advanced Micro Targeting was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. On its website, the company said, "Advanced Micro Targeting (AMT) is a direct democracy firm that sells big ideas. Big ideas like ending government corruption, giving voters the right to decide what's best for them, and electing leaders who actually listen to the voters. We go where the people are. Sometimes knocking on doors, approaching people in parking lots, libraries and other venues where people gather. ... Since 2008, and throughout the United States, our team delivered victories for our clients from major metropolitan areas such as Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, and New York City, to the suburbs of Washington D.C. and Kentucky's coal country. AMT's disciplined petitioners and voter contact specialists fought through blizzards in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Ohio, then beat the summer heat in Nevada and Texas to qualify ballot initiatives."

Since 2015, Advanced Micro Targeting received five Pollie Awards (awarded by the American Association of Political Consultants) for "the nation’s best ballot qualification effort and the nation’s best GOTV program" for AMT's work in Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, and Oregon. Advanced Micro Targeting received a 2020 Reed Award for Best Use of Paid Field Program for Ballot Initiative for their involvement with a Memphis ballot initiative concerning public safety.

Petition drives

The following ballot measures appeared on the ballot after the sponsoring campaign committee hired Advanced Micro Targeting to collect signatures. Since 2016, 13 ballot measures appeared on the ballot after the sponsoring committee(s) hired Advanced Micro Targeting to gather signatures. Of the eight measures that appeared on the ballot, 10 were approved and three were defeated. Sponsoring committees paid an average of $736,360.39 in total for Advanced Micro Targeting's signature gathering services per ballot measure.

Measures on the ballot (2016-2022)

Year	Measure	Measure description	Total cost	Signatures required	CPRS	Outcome
2016	Montana CI-116	Provides specific rights for crime victims	$462,000.00	48,349	$9.56	a
2016	North Dakota Measure 3	Provides specific rights for crime victims	$218,750	26,904	$8.13	a
2017	Ohio Issue 1	Provides specific rights for crime victims	$2,300,000.00	306,591	$7.50	a
2018	Alaska Measure 1	Creates salmon habitat protection standards and permit requirements	$196,101.31	32,127	$6.10	d
2018	North Dakota Measure 1	Establishes an ethics commission, bans foreign political contributions, and enacts provisions related to lobbying and conflicts of interest	$260,000.00	26,904	$9.66	a
2018	North Dakota Measure 3	Removes marijuana and other products from list of controlled substances and provides for automatic expungement of convictions from legalized controlled substances	$248,857.00	26,904	$9.25	d
2020	Alaska Measure 1	Increases taxes on certain oil production in the North Slope	$163,333.34	28,501	$5.73	d
2020	Alaska Measure 2	Changes Alaska's election policies, including establishing top-four primaries, ranked-choice voting, and campaign finance law changes	$236,250.00	28,501	$8.29	a
2022	Arizona Proposition 211	Requires that anyone making independent expenditures of more than $50,000 on a statewide campaign or $25,000 on a local campaign to disclose the names of the money's original sources	$1,220,000.00	237,645	$5.13	a
2022	Arkansas Issue 4	Legalizes marijuana	$2,253,440.30	89,151	$25.28	a
2022	Nebraska Initiative 433	Increases the minimum wage to $15 by 2026	$1,202,033.07	86,776	$13.85	a
2022	Nevada Question 3	Creates open top-five primaries and ranked-choice voting for general elections, which would apply to congressional, gubernatorial, state executive official, and state legislative elections.	$2,000,000.00	135,561	$14.75	a
2022	North Dakota Constitutional Measure 1	Limits the governor to serving two four-year terms and limiting state legislators to serving eight years in the state House and eight years in the state Senate.	$329,000.00	31,164	$10.56	a

This chart was last updated after statewide ballot measure elections in 2022.

Recent petition drive efforts

Florida 2022 sports betting initiative

See also: Florida Sports Betting Initiative (2022)

In 2022, Florida Education Champions, the sponsoring committee for a ballot initiative to authorize online sports betting in Florida, hired Advanced Micro Targeting to collect signatures. To qualify for the ballot, 891,589 valid signatures were required. In Florida, signatures must be validated by county elections officials by February 1st. As of January 30, the Florida Division of Elections showed that elections officials had validated 495,537 of the signatures submitted by the campaign. Florida Education Champions paid $23,864,575 to Advanced Micro Targeting for signature collection. The campaign announced on January 28, 2022, that the initiative would not meet the signature requirements and would not qualify for the ballot, stating, "We are extremely encouraged by the level of support we saw from the more than one million Floridians who signed our petition and thank them for their efforts in wanting to bring safe and legal sports betting to Florida, while funding public education. While pursuing our mission to add sports betting to the ballot we ran into some serious challenges, but most of all the COVID surge decimated our operations and ability to collect in-person signatures."

Politico reported on November 29, 2021, that the Seminole Tribe of Florida was "paying petition gathering firms to not work in Florida during the 2022 midterms as part of an effort to block rival proposed gaming constitutional amendments — a strategy that also includes running a separate informal signature gathering operation and hiring workers that interfere with other petition gatherers." Seminole spokesperson Gary Bitner said the tribe "assembled the best team of political consultants in the country [and is] currently engaged to oppose multiple outside interests that have initially invested a combined $60 million in PAC money to hire more than a thousand people to fight the Tribe’s success." Faten Alkhulifi, regional director at Advanced Micro Targeting, said, "I have never seen it this bad. I have seen blockers before, but not like this. It makes these canvassers fear for their safety. I’ve seen people about to sign, then they end up walking away, sometimes scared." Politico also reported that "As part of the effort, the Seminole Tribe of Florida has also been paying to circulate a separate petition that it claims supports the Seminole’s compact and new revenue for Florida. That effort, known as a plebiscite, is not tied to any specific measure being proposed for the 2022 ballot, but asks things like a signer’s name and address. The Seminole Tribe of Florida says the plebiscite is about 'education.' But supporters of the ballot measure argue it muddies the waters, making people think they have already signed a petition in support of one of the two ballot measures, when in reality they have signed a piece of paper not associated with any official campaign." Zachery Herrington, state director of Advanced Micro Targeting, said, "That’s the thing, when we come and ask someone to sign a petition saying it will increase funding for local schools, we hear them tell our gatherers that they have already signed. It’s totally confusing, as it’s designed to be."

Ballot initiative signature costs

See also: Laws governing the initiative process and Analysis of signature costs in past years

The cost of getting an initiative before voters varies widely by state and by initiative proposal. The requirements and restrictions imposed by state law form a major factor in the expense of an initiative signature petition effort.

Higher signature requirements are a straightforward example of a reason an initiative petition campaign might be more expensive in one state than in another. Other restrictions that can make a difference in the cost of a petition campaign include:

• Distribution requirements - It is easier and less expensive to collect a lot of signatures in one very populous area than a small number of signatures from lots of smaller, less-populated areas.
• Pay-per-signature bans - Paying signature gatherers by signature is one of the most cost-efficient ways to fund signature gathering efforts.
• Restrictions on circulators - Restricting who can collect signatures limits competition between petition companies and professional signature gatherers.
• Initiative petition circulation periods - If proponents have less time to collect signatures, the process can be more expensive.

Measuring the cost

See also: Analysis of signature costs in past years

Ballotpedia uses two ways to measure the cost of an initiative or veto referendum petition drive.

1. According to the total cost of gathering the required signatures to put the initiative or veto referendum on the ballot
2. According to the total cost divided by the number of signatures required to qualify the measure for the ballot or Cost Per Required Signature (CPRS)

Total cost: The total cost depends on all of the factors that can make a petition effort more or less expensive, including the population of the state and the state's signature requirements. This measurement does not necessarily indicate how difficult it is to run a signature petition campaign in a state relative to other states or how hard and expensive it is to collect a given valid signature. It takes into consideration the population and signature requirements for a state. For example, the average total cost of a successful initiative petition drive in California in 2016 was just over $2.9 million, while in Oklahoma the average total cost was about $870,000. Initiatives in California, however, require over four times as many signatures and affect 10 times as many people.

Cost Per Required Signature (CPRS): The cost per required signature cuts out the variable of a state's signature requirements and shows the cost for each signature needed to qualify the measure for the ballot. This second measurement is a better indication of how difficult it is to run a signature petition campaign in a given state relative to other states. For example, the average CPRS in California in 2016 was $6.20 while the average CPRS in Oklahoma was $9.59, but the average total petition cost was $2.9 million in California and about $870,000 in Oklahoma.

From the perspective of a national organization or proponents of a national agenda, this means that a lower CPRS generally means that a campaign could potentially affect more people and achieve more political influence per dollar spent, while the total petition cost might dictate in which states the campaign could actually afford to launch a successful petition drive.

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Advanced Micro Targeting. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

Advanced Micro Targeting - Google News

See also

• Ballot initiative
• Ballot measures cost per required signatures analysis
• Petition drive management companies
• Signature requirements for ballot measures
• Initiative petition signature validity rates
• Initiative petition circulation periods

External links

• Advanced Micro Targeting website
• Advanced Micro Targeting Facebook page
• Advanced Micro Targeting Twitter page