In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.
Properly implemented, this could mitigate so many problems with contemporary democracy, especially lobbying and two-party systems.
We do use sortition for the most direct part of our government in the United States. Juries grand and petite are both populated with a more or less randomly selected group of citizens, then filtered for bias.
This also makes juries the most unpredictable part of government.
Those are very small bodies though, so the law of large numbers doesn’t come into play that much. What’s proposed here (disclaimer, didn’t read the article, but been a proponent of sortition for a long time) is to compose democratic bodies like congress, parliament, senate, etc. by sortition, where the large number of members should remove some of that randomness. Also, could it get much more random than some of the lunatics currently in congress?
Rigging a US Election would require having thousands if not millions of people in on it and all of which keeping a secret.
Rigging a lottery would require compromising one person.
Only if it were implemented in one place, as a centralised ballot. Why not have States individually run their own?
… in fact, I wonder if it’d be legal under US law (I’m not an American myself) for a State to unilaterally start using sortition to provide their representatives? 🤔
Pretty sure it would be legal. The number of representatives is defined, but each state is free to decide however they like who they’re sending. The only real sticking point would be the absolute hissy fit the two main political parties would throw. It would be somewhat hilarious though to see the kinds of knots the lobbyists would tie themselves into if they suddenly had to handle a mob of random citizens instead of the professional leaches they normally work with.
Or the certification of one now — which has been attempted.
Yeah. Why not just make things easier by taking a representative sample of the population instead?
Oh, who decides that the sample is representative?
There are a reason polls are not always accurate. But at least those try to get a good sample. But you want random people appointed to government? Who the fuck thinks this is how selecting people should work? Are you ok OP?
You think therw is corruption now? Let’s just let an algorithm randomly sample people that don’t want to be in government to be our representatives! What could go wrong?!
Why do people keep trying to “fix” a democracy who’s main problem is capitalism. Just to avoid that as the problem?
Why do people keep trying to “fix” a democracy
Because we’ve seen the alternatives, time and time again. Historically the medicine has been worse than the disease.
Did you cut my sentence off midway to change it’s meaning and then reply to that? I’ve never seen that level of stupid. Wow. Thanks for the laugh I guess.
You can’t even get people to participate in elections once every two years and you want to force them into a random political office?
Tbf if you offer them stable income for a year and reasonable working hours, i’m willing to bet it would even incentivize poorer people to influence politics
True but afterwards they have to return to their lives. There are professions where you can’t just take time off for a year and not just because your employer won’t like it. We recently had a discussion over here about making everybody do a year of some kind of (paid!) civil service (like help out in hospitals, it’s a whole thing) and that’s logistically impossible (not to mention unpopular).
Although you make a fair point and i acknowledge that this is a caveat which needs to be fixed, i still think that there is something to be found in roandomly choosing who gets to decide.
