As in most statewide petition campaigns, the group hired a professional firm to collect signatures. Merian's Friends agreed to pay the company 90 cents for each signature collected. But soon after the campaign began, most of the professional petition gatherers left for California. There's an industry out there, they're like migrant workers, who do this as a career. They expect to get a dollar per signature now, especially toward the end of a campaign, when campaigns get desperate.
Donations are easier to find than volunteers willing to gather signatures themselves.
The group now has 155,000 signatures, and had hoped to gather 350,000 to provide a cushion for invalid signatures. The group hopes to pass a measure making assisted suicide legal in Michigan under strictly controlled conditions. Oregon is the only state to allow assisted suicides. She was the 19th person Kevorkian is known to have helped die. In her last moments, Frederick, who hadn't spoken for more than a year, answered Kevorkian's final question on whether she wanted to die by tapping two times on a pad of paper.