In the fall of 2010, I began an attempt to put 4 proposals on the ballot for the 2012 general election in Michigan. The petition drive never got off the ground because I wasn't able to raise the $1-2 million needed to pay for it. So my first bit of advice is don't start unless you know where you are going to get your funding. And don't count on doing it with volunteers. To conduct a successful petition drive with volunteers, your proposal would have to be extremely popular, and if it was that popular, the legislature would have passed it.

Here are links to the topics I'll cover:

• About Ballot Initiatives

• Preparing the Petition Form

• Ballot Question Committee

• Finding a Professional Signature-gathering Firm

• My Petition Drive Management System

And here are some comments by political consultant Mark Grebner.

The website I created for my petition drive no longer exists, but you can see what it looked like here.