Vote! or others will choose for you.

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Yoram Gat

The Israeli elections are three days away and the campaign is reaching its inevitable crescendo. Something called “movement for social media” is adding its contribution to the cacophony with a celebrity clip whose message is “Vote! or others will choose for you.” (In Hebrew ‘vote’ and ‘choose’ are the same word.)

The campaign organizers explained back in October that it was prompted by falling voter turnout rates in Israel. Voter turnout has dropped from close to 80% throughout the second half of the 20th century to under 70% in the three elections of the first decade of the 21st.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Press | 1 Comment »

And Now for Something Completely Different…

Posted on January 19, 2013 by peterstone

There’s apparently a fictional newspaper online called the Mammalian Daily, which purports to cover the lives of a bunch of animals living in a zoo. Apparently, the animal leaders of the zoo are selected by sortition. See…

Focus on: Sortition

It is, however, a stratified sample by category of animal. We don’t want a ruling body dominated by amphibians, after all.

Filed under: Fiction, Sortition | 3 Comments »