The ‘Just Label It” campaign has gotten more signatures than any campaign in history for the labeling of genetically modified foods. Since October of 2011, the campaign has received over 900,000 signatures, with 55 politicians joining in on the movement. So what’s the problem here?

Evidently, the FDA counts the amount of signatures not by how many people signed, but how many different individual letters are brought to it. To the FDA, even tens of thousands of signatures presented on a single petition are counted as – you guessed it – a single comment. This is how, despite over a million supporters being gathered by the petition, the FDA concluded a count of only 394.

“This is an election year and there are more than a million people who say this is important to them. This is petition has nothing to do with whether or genetically modified foods are dangerous. We don’t label dangerous foods, we take them off the shelves. This petition is about a the citizens’ right to know what they are eating and whether or not these foods represent a novel change.” said Andrew Kimbrell an attorney for the Center for Food Safety, one of the partner groups on the Just Label It campaign

Organizers say the campaign garnered more than a million supporters, far more than any other petition brought to the FDA in history. But the FDA disagrees. By its count the number is: 394.

The agency says that if 35,000 people, for instance, sign their name to the same form letter it only counts as one person or "comment." And if tens of thousands sign a petition, they are only counted as one "comment," too. "This is the problem with the very un-friendly regulations.gov site," said Sue McGovern spokesperson for the Just Label It campaign in a statement. "It will not allow groups like Just Label It to direct individual comments from our site into theirs.

Consequently, McGovern says JLI has to send its petitions and signatures as PDFs to the agency, where a petition with "tens of thousands of signatures/commenters" is counted as one.