Drawing a statistical microcosm out of the mass population, regardless of its abstract attractiveness, isn’t enough to make a Proxy Electorate seem legitimate in the eyes of the populace. Democracy, the populace generally and strongly believes, allows it to express itself by balloting, the outcome of which will never be a microcosm.
The most severe drawback to government lottery … is that it cuts people off from the opportunity to vote for their congressional representatives.… It is this specific citizen endorsement—and not any abstract idea of democratic representation—that gives the government is legitimacy and insures citizen, acceptance of the government decisions. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 74.
Advocates of sortition should therefore somehow incorporate balloting.
If you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant [their intuitional “priors”] first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed. —Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012.
Ordinary people don’t want randomly chosen noxious and/or numbskull neighbors making decisions for them. Instead, they wish to elevate persons whom they respect.
It is at least worth considering whether people in electing the kinds of congressional candidates they do have deliberately chosen not to be governed by their barber, their accountant, the unemployed derelict who hangs aound the neighborhood liquor store, or the nice lady who runs the cosmetic counter at Woolworth’s … but because they want to be ruled by people whom they perceive (however, mistakenly) as successful, powerful and capable … often with a background in law. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 77.
Demiocracy will satisfy this yearning to elect “the best man.”
If balloting were finagled away somehow, sortition might not be robust enough to weather political storms. A non-negligible minority might not accept the new system as legitimate in a crisis, leading to disorder and collapse. Only if there is regular “buy-in” to the system—by balloting—will it have strong enough legitimacy.
If we grant that the common man has common sense and common decency, or anyway most of the time and/or more than any feasible alternative, those persons he/she ballots for, whom he/she knows personally, should, on average, deviate from the microcosm in a desirable way—or, at least, in a democratic way.
There is no typical American. Yet … here were the archetypical Americans. They were the people WE the people want to be. —Gary Wills, Nixon Agonistes, 1971, 220-2, II, 4.
To recap, first the populace implicitly wants a sifted sample of their neighbors to disproportionately populate the pool. The bal-lottery gives them the means to do so—or at least to attempt to do so. This is necessary to mollify them for the loss of a direct vote for their officeholders, which mollification is necessary to dethrone DeMockery.
Second, the public is wary of giving even a non-objectionable group of neighbors the power to write laws. I suspect this is an important reason why sortition has not caught on.
… the people … being unqualified for the management of affairs requiring intelligence above the common level, yet competent judges of human character, they chose for their management representative, some by themselves immediately, others by electors chosen by themselves. —Jefferson, letter to DuPont de Nemours, 1816-4-24.
Legislating, I believe, is, at least ideally, … a pursuit that demands a high level of skill and experience.… If, as you suggest, and I fully agree, people [currently] chosen this way are not skilled or responsible enough, it is not, to my mind, an indication that such qualities are unnecessary…. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 73.
Giving our under-qualified neighbors only electoral power would alleviate this concern.
The public, in other words, by implication, wants legislators and governors who are above average, and who can be held responsible and dismissed if things go wrong. Demiocracy’s election of officeholders provides this.
Representative democracy’s existing elections are implicitly a process of sifting, of deviating from the mean, of elevating “The Best Man,” ideally (supposedly) a Pericles, from the populace.
Better-quality congressmen in a state’s delegation tend to be nominated as senatorial candidates, and then to proceed to the Senate. This is a form of sifting.
And indirect elections are also a sifting method that was not considered undemocratic when they were prescribed for Senators and Presidents in our original Constitution.
Thus, given that those sifting processes are desirable and/or acceptable, so should be the sifting produced by a bal-lottery.
Demiocracy is “in the grain” of American political culture in another way, as its special-topic legislatures would mirror existing congressional committees.
[T]hose changes are beneficial which bring them back to their original principles. —Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Book III, Chapter 1.
Sortition lacks these cultural roots. Its rationale of the microcosm is abstract and sweeping—redolent, as Lady Bracknell might say, of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
By the way, indirect election is the key feature of so-called “liquid democracy,” a proposed internet-empowered variant of direct democracy, under which voters transfer their votes on particular topics, or on all topics, to persons whose opinions they trust on those matters. See the proposal’s Wikipedia entry at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy.
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I think the intuitions you are making a case for are simply cultural prejudices. I have not seen anything in the literature indicating that the citizens of Athens were dissatisfied with their system due to not being able to vote tor their representatives. Perhaps someone can point such out.
Some three hundreds years ago, it was a widespread intuition among Europeans that the indigenous peoples of the New World and Africa were morally and intellectually inferior to themselves. Yesterday’s intuitions are today’s prejudices, as will today’s intuition be tomorrow’s prejudices. To limit the scope of possibility to what satisfies cultural intuitions limits what is rationally possible and allows cultural prejudice to enforce that limit.
Perhaps your system is a way around that, but I found it exceedingly complex and a tedious read. Eventually, realizing the proposals were so off in the future and unclear as how likely when, if ever, they could be adopted, I simply gave up making the effort to understand them. That might be my own prejudice, but there is much to read and understand and limited time. I have spent considerable time investigating sortition, if your system catches on, perhaps I will revisit it. Cheers!
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ToTheHilt wrote:
“I have not seen anything in the literature indicating that the citizens of Athens were dissatisfied with their system due to not being able to vote tor their representatives.”
That’s because Athens was small enough to be a direct democracy—for all the voters to assemble, speak, and vote. Modern congressional districts are too populous and spread out for that, so modern citizens WOULD be dissatisfied if they lost the right to vote. (The number of voters in the average congressional district of 1790 was 40,000, 5% the size of today’s.)
“Some three hundreds years ago, it was a widespread intuition among Europeans that the indigenous peoples of the New World and Africa were morally and intellectually inferior to themselves. Yesterday’s intuitions are today’s prejudices, as will today’s intuition be tomorrow’s prejudices. To limit the scope of possibility to what satisfies cultural intuitions limits what is rationally possible …. Perhaps your system is a way around that …” “… and unclear as how likely when, if ever, they could be adopted, ….”
Actually, I’m hopeful that today’s indigenes will be early adopters of Demiocracy. I devote a whole subsequent chapter to them, and another chapter to “Asians, Arabs, Africans,” whom it seems to me are also likelier to be early adopters than us Westerners. Here’s what I said in an email to Yoram five days ago:
“In recent days I’ve been encouraged about the adoption-prospects for Demiocracy by the explicit anti-party policies of the Baha’i faith [mostly based outside the Western world], of small island countries, and of the indigenes of northern Canada. Any of these (plus one of the 800+ native tribal governments in N. America), might like what I’ve written about Demiocracy enough to give it a trial.”
“I found it [“your system”] exceedingly complex ….”
Here’s how I responded in a comment on Chapter 12 to a similar complaint by Yoram:
“Is Demiocracy hard to understand because of its complexities? I grant that it takes an effort to wrap one’s head aound something so new and different, but I don’t think that its complexities are the difficulty, because:
“The initial implementations of Demiocracy would be in nonpolitical entities like the armed forces, workplaces, labor unions, cooperatives, and student councils. These groups would not employ topical specialization or layering, two of Demiocracy’s complexities. As for the rest:
“So the populace would have years to get used to a basic version of Demiocracy. And a basic version is all that would be needed to elect the lowest—local area—layer of political officeholders. This is where Demiocracy would presumably first be adopted, out of caution. Once adopted locally, this would further acclimate the citizenry to the new system.
“These last two complexities are intended to avoid over-burdening electorates; and to give them sufficient knowledge and experience to be good judges of laws and candidates’ fitness for office. These are necessities if the populace is to govern in any real sense.”
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I of course agree with “toothehilt” regarding the complexity of your proposals. The problem with them is not that they are “new and different”, but that they are hard to understand and even harder to see as leading to a democratic system.
But I also agree with toothehilt’s point about your arguments regarding legitimacy. The notion that there is something inherently legitimate about elections is just modern dogma. Like many components of the electoralist dogma, it is well-refuted by experience. Indeed experience shows that the only real source of legitimacy is good outcomes – any other source of legitimacy is post-hoc rationalization. Any system which produces bad outcomes will be perceived as illegitimate, and any system that produces good outcomes will be perceived as legitimate. Just to take an example, the non-electoralist Chinese system is perceived as legitimate (by the Chinese) because it delivers good outcomes.
The question, then, is whether a sortition based system can be expected to produce good outcomes. I think there is every reason to think it would: https://equalitybylot.com/2013/09/29/a-theory-of-sortition-part-2-of-2/.
(Of course, assertions by Jefferson, or other elitists, about the wonders of elites and how the masses actually yearn and should be thankful to be ruled by “the natural aristocracy”, are no more than self-serving propaganda.)
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Yoram wrote: “Your proposals … are hard to understand …”
Demiocracy is of course more complex than sortition: i.e., than randomly selecting a few hundred citizens, dropping them into a capitol building , and telling them to Go Legislate, under the tutelage of a passel of experts.
But the added complications are necessary to achieve good government and legitimacy. Demiocracy has five main components, which are each within the understanding of a teenager:
1 & 2. The ballottery, under which 1) citizens drop the names of five (say) deserving acquaintances into a ballottery box, and 2) from which a small sample of names is drawn and placed into a reserve pool. This is not much more complicated than sortition and is less complicated than the “stratification” often called for by sortition’s proponents.
“… and even harder to see as leading to a democratic system.”
Chapter 19, which we should get to within two weeks, compactly summarizes the advantages of Demiocracy. In previous chapters I’ve shown that downsizing legislatures and electorates enables everyday-citizen amateurs to run for office at no expense and to serve as legislators without needing to have a ready and defensible opinion on the full range of political issues, unlike the facile and slippery members of the political class. This is a big step toward true democracy.
Specialization is necessary to give common-man electors a topic small enough for them all to grasp it. Ostensibly giving them more power would actually disempower them, by overwhelming them with generalities and distractions. The devil is in the details, and that is where attention must be directed.
The ballottery enables the office to seek the man, which is an essential trait of a true democracy. Sortition fails to provide this selectivity.
“The notion that there is something inherently legitimate about elections is just modern dogma.”
I agree that elections don’t legitimize a political system. The Potemkin elections in Russia and China are shams. And elections in the West involving a large electorate choosing a multitude of officeholders and involving a score of issues (20, say) are also shams, although not as bad.
But what I said was not that elections bestow legitimacy, but that the voters BELIEVE that it does. I wrote, “Democracy, the populace generally and strongly believes, allows it to express itself by balloting.” And I wrote, “Only if there is regular “buy-in” to the system—by balloting—will it have strong enough legitimacy.”
“experience shows that the only real source of legitimacy is good outcomes – any other source of legitimacy is post-hoc rationalization.”
The American populace is unhappy with the outcomes of its government, but nevertheless believes it is legitimate, as evidenced by its emphatic condemnation of the January 6 rioters, and by the popular and unchallenged rhetoric about the need to “defend democracy” in the form of the existing order. This isn’t a rationalization by an outsider. It is a FACT about the body politic that cannot be waved away by calling it a bad name. It is a FACT that impedes the adoption of sortition—not the machinations of elitists. People believe in voting, and any reform aiming to do away with or marginalize politicians, pressure groups, propaganda, pelf (money), and partisanship, as sortition does, must retain some way for the populace to express itself by balloting.
“Just to take an example, the non-electoralist Chinese system is perceived as legitimate (by the Chinese) because it delivers good outcomes.”
“The question, then, is whether a sortition based system can be expected to produce good outcomes. I think there is every reason to think it would: https://equalitybylot.com/2013/09/29/a-theory-of-sortition-part-2-of-2/. “
Here’s a paragraph from that link:
“If the system is working as the argument describes, most citizens would feel, upon examination of the workings and decisions of the decision-making body, that the policies enacted represent their interests. To measure whether this is the case, a separate body, also made up by sortition, can be put in charge of monitoring the decision-making body. This monitoring body can then decide whether the policy made by the decision-making body represents the interests of the population. The sentiment of the monitoring body should reflect the interests of the population.”
That’s sensible. Because it adds complexity. But it’s not complex enough, because it involves a single omni-component entity, operating post hoc, which can’t or won’t drill deep enough into the devilish details of many individual issues to avoid bad blunders. It is likely to be led astray by feel-good / sound-good rhetoric and also not to investigate possible second-order effects. A classic blunder was the disastrous “ground nuts scheme” of the Attlee regime, which sounded wonderful.
Sortition without balloter input to a ballottery is unlikely to do a good-outcome job of representing soldiers, employees or union members. Surely you must concede that. So why not concede that that applies to the public sector too?
A substantial minority of the persons drawn would not want to serve, or would be too irresponsible or dishonest or stupid to perform adequately. The populace as a whole recognizes this FACT, which is why it must be allowed to no-ballot such persons if it is to be persuaded to accept a government composed of the common people.
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I left a detailed comment to your reply to me but it vanished as I attempted to navigate the login process here. I will just say that I don’t agree with your characterization of Athens as a direct democracy and invite you to re-read Terry Bouricius excellent description in his book, I’m assuming you are familiar with it.
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Since that went through I will leave another comment. Your explanation of your system in the comment did not clarify it to me. I’ve also asked a few other people who have read your posts or some of them, and they all thought it was too complicated. Understand what is being said here, I felt it was too complicated for me, they felt it was too complicated for them. That, as you like to say, is a FACT. I would not even attempt to explain demiocracy to anyone, but I enjoy introducing sortition to people. Perhaps I am one of the stupid that your system would eliminate from the decision-making process.
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TooTheHilt wrote:
“I left a detailed comment to your reply to me but it vanished as I attempted to navigate the login process here.”
Ouch. It’s best to compose on one’s computer, not on the web, for safety and better record-keeping.
“I don’t agree with your characterization of Athens as a direct democracy and invite you to re-read Terry Bouricius excellent description in his book, I’m assuming you are familiar with it.”
I read his book and emailed him about a couple of typos I found, but got no reply. I’ve mislaid it, but I’ve just reread the early part of it at: Bouricius T., (2013) “Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day”, Journal of Public Deliberation 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.156
Here’s the start of one sentence: “The Athenian separation of powers between multiple randomly selected bodies and the self-selected attendees of the People’s Assembly ….”
Sounds a bit complicated, no? A person could feign obtuse incomprehension, no?
Of course I’d love to see his proposals enacted, because they would get rid of the Pernicious P’s and provide us with a cleaner politics. My objections are 1) that modern publics, unlike those of ancient Athens, have become accustomed to voting as a basic right, and also that they see or imagine the downsides of a mere dragnet scoop through the whole population to obtain lawmakers. The quotations by Malcolm Margolin above express these views.
To mollify modern publics enough to accept a lottery, it would seem that they must be given a ballot that would direct random selection only through persons they have balloted for, and that those chosen should only be Proxy Electors, not lawmakers. This is less adventurous than what TB wants, but my caution should mollify, which is necessary for acceptance.
=========
BTW, Google tells me that Terry Bouricius is a senior policy analyst for FairVote: the Center for Voting and Democracy. Here he is on Fairvote in 2008 defending Burlington’s IRV—Instant Runoff Voting, aka RCV—Ranked Choice Voting: https://fairvote.org/response-to-faulty-analysis-of-burlington-irv-election/
If our current 2024 presidential campaign were being conducted under RCV rules, No Labels would have no difficulty in recruiting a well known centrist candidate who would get enough second-choice votes to beat either of the two major party horrors in the runoff process. In all the handwringing about our current dilemma no major columnist or other big influencer has thought to point that out. Crazy. You’d think this would be a supremely Teachable Moment.
Here’s his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bouricius?wprov=sfti
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TooTheHilt wrote:
“Your explanation of your system in the comment did not clarify it to me.”
OK, here’s my elevator speech:
“All you folks get five ballots to cast for five acquaintances whom you’d trust as your political proxies.
“A random sample is drawn from them and the selectees are assigned to one of several “electoral colleges,” each of which elects and continuously oversees only one legislator, at the local level.
(Please don’t say this is beyond your comprehension.)
“These proxies also ballot amongst themselves for proxies at the next geographic level up (county), who are drawn randomly from a bal-lot box. And so forth up to the state and national levels.
“Legislators at the state and national levels serve only in the equivalent of one of our existing 20 or so congressional committees, each of which is concerned with some specific topical domain. They don’t serve in the equivalent of a full legislature.
(Is the air too thin now?—it shouldn’t be.)
“The proxies that oversee and elect legislators in the full legislature are drawn from a bal-lot box filled by ballots amongst all the committee-level proxies.” END.
That could all be said in a five-minute elevator speech. In fact it took me just over 90 seconds.
Probably it would help if I could show you a picture—a diagram, or rather a cluster of diagrams, showing:
People’s ballots flowing into a box,
Proxies emerging from the box and dispersing into a multitude of Demi-legislator electoral colleges (aka Proxy Electorates),
Candidates (represented by arrows) approaching each Proxy Electorate,
An officeholder (one of the candidate’s arrows making a U-turn) flowing into a demi-legislature of from 5 to 25 members,
And another set of ballots emerging from each Proxy Electorate upward to 1) a bal-lot box for proxies at the next geographic level up and 2) to a bal-lot box for proxies overseeing the full legislature (at the state and national levels).
A viewer couldn’t grasp the whole arrangement at a glance, but it wouldn’t be too gothic to yield to analysis after a couple of minutes. It is not too hard to “imagine what one knows” if one tries.
I mightn’t have thought of employing a diagram if not for what you’ve said, which is one reason I appreciate the opportunity to dialog with my critics here.
(I’d REALLY appreciate it if someone here would voluntarily create the set of diagrams I’ve described. That’s asking for the moon, I know, but there’s no harm in asking, right?)
I gave Yoram an even simpler guide for the perplexed. I wrote,
“The initial implementations of Demiocracy would be in nonpolitical entities like the armed forces, workplaces, labor unions, cooperatives, and student councils. These groups would not employ topical specialization or layering, two of Demiocracy’s complexities.
“… do you have any objections to the Demiocratic election of union officials and board of director members? Or to the elevation, via the ballottery, of Inner Voice Entities by currently voiceless soldiers, prisoners, and employees? Even if Demiocracy achieved nothing more, implementing one or other of the above would be a tremendous social advance.”
Without the ability of members to improve the odds of a pure lottery, no representation of the voiceless groups mentioned would be feasible. Would you still maintain that only a pure lottery is acceptable?
Those could be the springboards for more complex, public-sector versions of Demiocracy, which would no longer seem too outré and/or baffling.
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Just a note about Roger’s mentioning my past work with FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy on ranked choice voting. It was while giving testimony to the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly looking at reforming the province’s voting method that I had my revelation about sortition. For the past 20 years nearly all of my political reform work has been focused on sortition. Anyone reading this comment unfamiliar with the book mentioned above by TooTheHilt, I am releasing for free on the Substack platform, you can access all of the back chapters and subscribe here:
https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elections?r=cvh3h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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It’s best to compose on one’s computer, not on the web, for safety and better record-keeping.
Thanks, I understand that, there were constraints preventing me from doing that.
I’m rushed, so I will only leave one response for now. You response to my claim that Athens was not a direct democracy was to point out how complicated it was. It was a non response. That hardly inspires me to continue the conversation with you. You could do well running for office though.
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It’s best to compose on one’s computer, not on the web, for safety and better record-keeping.
Thanks, I understand that, there were constraints preventing me from doing that.
I’m rushed, so I will only leave one response for now. You response to my claim that Athens was not a direct democracy was to point out how complicated it was. It was a non response. That hardly inspires me to continue the conversation with you. You could do well running for office though.
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TooTheHilt wrote:
“You response to my claim that Athens was not a direct democracy was to point out how complicated it was. It was a non response.”
By not objecting, I implicitly conceded your claim that Athens’ operated its democracy mostly on the basis of representatives chosen by lot.
But I did respond to the lesson you drew from that: that a similar system could be employed today. You expressed that as follows:
“I have not seen anything in the literature indicating that the citizens of Athens were dissatisfied with their system due to not being able to vote tor their representatives. Perhaps someone can point such out.”
I replied:
“My objections are 1) that modern publics, unlike those of ancient Athens, have become accustomed to voting as a basic right, and also that they see or imagine the downsides of a mere dragnet scoop through the whole population to obtain lawmakers. The quotations by Malcolm Margolin above express these views.
“To mollify modern publics enough to accept a lottery, it would seem that they must be given a ballot that would direct random selection only through persons they have balloted for, and that those chosen should only be Proxy Electors, not lawmakers.”
However, I recognize now that I failed to respond to this additional claim of yours:
“I think the intuitions you are making a case for [as expressed in the statements by Malcolm Margolin that I quoted] are simply cultural prejudices.”
I called them “views.” If they are prejudices, they are not as superficial and disposable as something like, “Don’t wear white shoes after Labor Day.”
The implication of “prejudices” is that reasonable persons should abandon those biased views after being confronted by pro-sortition arguments, and further that there is no real obstacle to getting the rest of the voting public to follow their lead—especially in light of the good outcomes and/or advice delivered by lottery-based supplementary entities. (I’m channeling Yoram in that last bit.)
But the response of Malcolm Margolin to the pro-sortition arguments of Callenbach and Phillips in “A Citizen Legislature” was not acceptance but an emphatic, reasoned rejection. It was a rejection that would be persuasive enough, probably, to deter the public from adopting an arrangement like that of Athens.
Further, the failure of any significant number of our opinion leaders to be moved and speak up for sortition, despite decades of case-making for it, indicates to me that Margolin’s position is widespread subconsciously, and would manifest itself in force if there were ever a serious prospect of abandoning elections.
Even if you are reluctant to concede that reasonable objections can be made to pure sortition, you should at least consider that acceptance of it would be easier to achieve if balloting were somehow incorporated in it for mollification purposes—if it could be done (as I’m sure it can) without the deleterious effects it has at present.
Look how hard is has been to get opinion leaders to speak up for Ranked Choice Voting, or some similar technique, to which no reasonable objection can be made, and for which a crying need is plain. Habitual practices are clung to tenaciously, as JS Mill observed. It is easier to work aound them than to tell the obstructionists that they aren’t being reasonable. One should mollify their elephantine intuitions, as Haidt advised in the quotation I used. (This is my inner politician speaking, I suppose, but it is enunciating what used to be called “the wisdom of the world.” If you want worldly success it should be heeded.)
Would Demiocracy be all that objectionable from a pure sortitionist POV? It would not be as egalitarian, but so what? It would be 90% more egalitarian than our current DeMockery. Isn’t that good enough; isn’t that worth the trade-off, if its prospects of acceptance are better?
I’m saying that because I envisage widespread implementation of ballotteried Inner Voice Entities among employees, soldiers, which require balloting, and Proxy Electorates among union members, to be the spearpoint and model for government-level implementation.
If that’s so, why fight it? Why not encourage egalitarians to dare to proclaim, by emails to co-workers, the existence of an Inner Voice Entity amongst themselves, and call for them to cast ballots by email to populate it? This would be a REAL way to “Occupy Wall Street.” And it would serve as a stepping stone to Occupying Government. Thereby empowering the common sense and common decency of the common man to pursue the common good. C’mon, man. 😏
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A longer elevator speech:
How can today’s election procedures be improved, so that the considered opinion of the public prevails?
1 An electorate must be small, say 5 to 15 to 25 to 50 members (at the four legislative levels) so it can deliberate amongst itself, so electors can feel that their vote counts, and so they will be attentive and vote responsibly.
2 Electors must be overseers of their officeholder throughout his term, hearing regular reports from him, along with comments from his critics. This is to enable them to vote knowledgeably in the next election, and for his opposing candidates to have built a record of what they would have done differently. Electors oversight would also include commissioning research and investigations.
3 The above implies that electorate’s terms must cover more than one elections.
4 Electorates must “meet” over a private internet channel, to enable its mere citizens to conveniently continuously oversee, and also to enable mere everyday citizens to be candidates without the backing of money, party endorsements, media propaganda, etc.—for which a small electorate is also a prerequisite.
5a Electorates must not be tasked with more responsibility than mere citizens can conveniently handle—which is what they would be if randomly selected. They must not be dragooned into the political class. That would breed resentment, diminished attention to their oversight-work, and a loss of contact with their real-world roots.
5b Consequently they should only elect legislators to the 20-25 congressional committees that exist at the state and national levels that specialize in some single topic, like Health, Commerce, Labor, Justice, etc. Not only will electors be happier with this lesser workload, they will also be more focused and thus able to penetrate more deeply into the issues, because “the devil is in the details.” Topically restricted elections would also enable legislation to better reflect the public’s policy preference profile than today’s issue-bundled elections.
5c For some of the reasons just given, electorates at lower levels should elect only one or two officeholders.
6 Five (say) electorates at the two higher levels should be “bundled” at election time so they can proportionately elect five legislators. Lacking PR, nearly all legislators would be centrists and the size of the Overton window would be too small.
7 Electors at the lower three levels could conduct a ballottery amongst themselves to choose electors at the next level up, or some of them, to preserve topical expertise and to promote the most respected members. But this is not necessary—those electors could be drawn mostly or wholly from the general public.
8 Electorates at the higher levels would conduct ballotteries amongst themselves to choose electors who would elect and oversee legislators in the full legislature.
9 Electorates could vote to direct their legislator how to vote. Experience will indicate whether these directives would be binding or not, and whether binding directives would require a supermajority vote.
10 Electors would be well paid and their real identities would be kept private.
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Founders & Fellows for Fateful Fingers (of randomization)
I believe our Founders would be as appalled as sortitionists are by our system of DeMockery, and would sympathize with their desire to empower Everyman by some nonpartisan randomizing process.
They wanted the common man to be the sovereign, or at least the ultimate sovereign. They would recognize that DeMockery, by replacing Everyman by every man, has displaced Everyman’s common sense and common decency.
1 Our Founders were against political parties, political propaganda, pressure groups, and office-seeking. They wanted the office to seek the man, either by the semi-spontaneous elevation of some public-spirited local notable (by the general public), or, among state legislatures and the national electoral college, by a nonpartisan attempt to find the best man, akin to an executive search committee’s.
“… its Framers intended it [Congress] to be … a deliberative assembly made up of uninstructed men, chosen by their neighbors because they are ‘virtuous’ men.” —Wilmoore Kendall (political scientist)
My ballottery process is similar in spirit: it would, more democratically, elevate non-notable local “worthies” by spontaneous neighborly nomination.
2 Our Founders believed in indirect elections: that was how they wanted the most important officeholders—senators and presidents—to be chosen. Demiocracy similarly elects all (topic-focused) legislators indirectly, and uses double indirection to elect legislators to the omni-topic full legislature.
3 The Founders envisaged legislators as having other jobs, rather than being full-time professional politicians. So does Demiocracy.
4 I believe that, if it were put to a vote, the American public would overwhelmingly prefer a ballottery over a pure lottery. I believe IOW that they would like to bend the fickle finger of fate. They would not want that finger fall on some rando Joe Schmoe, but rather to elevate some person they admire.
5 I believe that the American public would be OK with the ballotteried allotted merely being their electoral proxies, not legislators themselves, because their proxies could direct their elected legislators which way to vote. And because this would leave topical, part-time legislative seats open to no-barrier, no-cost competition by other mere citizens.
6 I believe Demiocracy would acquire strong legitimacy over time by delivering “good outcomes,” or at least better outcomes than “all the other systems.”
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Roger, do you have any data on what percentage of the population would refuse to give up their vote in favor of a sortition selected assembly?
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TooTheHilt:
I posted your question to Google and it responded:
“There isn’t much information about what percentage of the population would refuse to give up their vote in favor of a sortition, but here’s some information about sortition and assemblies.”
I personally would have no objection to giving up my right to vote for a party politician, which I have never exercised.
And I’d be willing to take a chance on “a sortition selected assembly”. But I fear that it might not deliver good outcomes, and thereby discredit the use of a lottery, for three reasons:
1 A mass assembly is a poor place to craft legislation, as JS Mill strenuously argued in Representative Government. Small demi-legislatures are better.
2 A random dragnet through the whole population will elevate too many duds and too few diamonds-in-the-rough, leading to a low and lackadaisical level of discussion—and thence, to poor and/or manipulated decisions. A ballottery would vastly improve the dud-to-diamond ratio.
3 The allotted assembly will not be able to “sell” and enforce its controversial decisions because A) Opponents will claim that its is incompetent to make them, citing dopey extracts from its debates, and B) Opponents will claim that it lacks legitimacy, not having roots in explicit popular consent via a ballot.
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Continuing …
I doubt the American population would ever be starkly asked to give up its voting system and replace it with a sortitionist system. Instead, the POWER of its voting would be gradually reduced to nearly nothing, as follows:
First a permanent third, sortition-based house of congress would be established. Then over time, if it became viewed by the public as being more aligned to its interests than the other two houses, its powers would be expanded until it became the sole real power in the legislative branch.
This would require a constitutional amendment, or two, or three, and maybe 100 years. Maybe only fifty years, if the sortitionist house performs as well as sortitionists hope, and/or if some combination of electoralist scandal and dire emergency assists the transformation.
Once the sortitionists have won, THEN they may begin to see that their system isn’t nearly as charming as it could be, and they will start to fine-tune it by backing into Demiocracy, thusly:
That’ll only take another century. At which point I’ll pop out of my coffin and shout “I told use so!” and y’all here will pop out too and give me a few Likes.
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ToTheHilt wrote, in the entry for Chapter 17:
“I will continue the discussion we were having in Ch 16 here [17]”
That wasn’t necessary. WordPress automatically notifies participants—REGISTERED participants—in a thread whenever a new comment is added. It’s better to stick to the original thread, and refresh it if not registered, so disputants can use the Find feature to locate exactly what was said previously, when needed. And so readers can get the whole thread in one place. THEREFORE I HAVE COPIED WHAT YOU POSTED BELOW AND PASTED IT INTO CHAPTER 16, HERE, WHERE IT BELONGS. Demiocracy, Chapter 16: Sortition, i.e., a purely lottery-chosen, randomized Proxy electorate, isn’t sufficiently legitimate; Democracy requires mass electoral input, ideally of a “sifting” sort | Equality by lot MY RESPONSE IS ATTACHED TO IT.
I will alert him to this in Chapter 17.
BEGIN TTH’s COMMENT FROM CHAPTER 17:
TTH: “You response to my claim that Athens was not a direct democracy was to point out how complicated it was. It was a non response.”
RK: “By not objecting, I implicitly conceded your claim that Athens’ operated its democracy mostly on the basis of representatives chosen by lot. “
TTH: Better would be to explicitly concede, provides clarity and is a good practice for instilling humility.
RK: But I did respond to the lesson you drew from that: that a similar system could be employed today. You expressed that as follows:
TTH: “I have not seen anything in the literature indicating that the citizens of Athens were dissatisfied with their system due to not being able to vote tor their representatives. Perhaps someone can point such out.”
RK: I replied:
“My objections are 1) that modern publics, unlike those of ancient Athens, have become accustomed to voting as a basic right, and also that they see or imagine the downsides of a mere dragnet scoop through the whole population to obtain lawmakers.”
TTH: This is your conjecture, which you have admitted to not having any empirical evidence for. I’ve never heard anyone that I have introduced sortition to voice the objection that voting is a basic right. I recently asked someone who has spoken to hundreds of people and he estimated the percentage somewhere between 5-10%. Considering that roughly half the people in the US don’t vote in presidential elections it may not be a strongly held view. Also, since voting is a recent phenomena, the cultural conditioning around it could be changed back to where it was for most of the millennia humans have lived in this world.
RK: “The quotations by Malcolm Margolin above express these views.”
TTH: Yes, Margolin seems to believe that the public wants lawyers to rule. Is he oblivious to polls consistently showing they are among the least trusted professionals?
A note on the word “complicated.” Something can be complicated without it being intellectually challenging. If I ask directions I can get a response with many turns that is more complicated than one that has no turns. You system has lots of “turns” – steps. Perhaps, “elaborate” is a better word. The steps are supposed to safeguard against corruption , but I think the more steps, the more likelihood of corruption, as each step introduces another opportunity for it.
While not intellectually challenging, you system is time consuming to read through, and you have failed, as far as I’m concerned in providing a need for it. Seems like a cure in search of a disease. Thus I am not motivated to spend the time to read through it. Now 17 entries in what is supposedly a blog devoted to equality by lot.
To end on a positive note, you said something to the effect of indigenous people may be the early adopters of Demiocracy. I don’t know about that, but recently the Zapatistas revamped the election system to begin at the level of the neighborhood, and then scale up, somewhat akin to your first step. You might want to contact them.
Lance Hilt
NOW HERE IS MY RESPONSE TO HIS COPIED-AND-PASTED COMMENT ABOVE:
TooTheHilt quoting me:
RK: “My objections are 1) that modern publics, unlike those of ancient Athens, have become accustomed to voting as a basic right, and also that they see or imagine the downsides of a mere dragnet scoop through the whole population to obtain lawmakers.”
TTH: “This is your conjecture, which you have admitted to not having any empirical evidence for.”
It’s a well-founded inference from the reluctance of the public to embrace sortition and from its persistence in voting.
TTH: “ I’ve never heard anyone that I have introduced sortition to voice the objection that voting is a basic right. I recently asked someone who has spoken to hundreds of people and he estimated the percentage somewhere between 5-10%.”
But the percentage would be over 90% if they were asked if elections are essential to democracy. Elections imply voting. Even proponents of sortition acknowledge the public’s attachment to voting/elections even while they bemoan it.
TTH: “Considering that roughly half the people in the US don’t vote in presidential elections …”
Wikipedia says: “Approximately 240 million people were eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election and ROUGHLY 66.1% of them submitted ballots ….”
TTH: “ … it may not be a strongly held view. Also, since voting is a recent phenomena, the cultural conditioning around it could be changed back to where it was for most of the millennia humans have lived in this world.”
But it has been impressed upon the public that its ancestors bled and died for the right to vote, thereby making it sacred; and any perceived impingement at present on voting rights is treated as a grave threat to human rights and reacted to with widespread alarm.
I believe the public can be weaned away from MASS-election voting, but that it is “a bridge too far” to try to remove ALL voting.
TTH: “Margolin seems to believe that the public wants lawyers to rule. Is he oblivious to polls consistently showing they are among the least trusted professionals?”
That stretches what he said a bit; what he said was: “they [voters] want to be ruled by people whom they perceive (however, mistakenly) as successful, powerful and capable … OFTEN [no more frequently than that] with a background in law.”
Regardless of what people tell pollsters about lawyers, being one doesn’t count against them when they run for office. Or when people have a grievance—they are quick to seek out a lawyer then.
That disconnect says something—first, that making large inferences from expressed opinions to actual behavior is often unwarranted.
Second, that people vote for lawyers because there isn’t much choice. Lawyers have flexible work schedules and can devote many months to campaigning without disrupting their careers. For that matter, they can usually arrange things so that they can continue to do their ordinary work, unlike people in most other occupations, even while serving in a state legislature, which rarely is in session for more than one-third of a year. Here’s what Google tells me is the length of sessions in my state:
“The Washington State Legislature meets annually on the second Monday in January. In odd-numbered years, the Legislature meets for 105 days, and in even-numbered years for 60 days.”
If competition for legislative positions is to be made more broadly accessible, legislative duties need to be reduced so they demand less time, and rescheduled so they occur at more convenient times.
Demiocracy reduces the time demanded by splitting legislatures into two dozed demi-legislatures, and schedules their sessions to weekends over the internet, which most people can spare. Participation’s burden can be even further lessened because it needn’t usually be “ live,” when done online. In this environment lawyers will not predominate. But until that happy day …
The gravamen of Margolin’s message, apart from his throwaway remark about lawyers, is that people want to have rulers who are ABOVE AVERAGE—e.g., “successful, powerful and capable.” ABOVE AVERAGE naturally implies a disinclination to adopt sortition, which elevates an average group, along with its disfunctional, below-average members. That latter is a misfeature voters are wary of—or will be if/when it is pointedly pointed out to them by disputants like Margolin.
Demiocracy accommodates this public preference for excellence of some sort (not necessarily that of “winners” who are “successful, powerful and capable”), and antipathy for excellence’s opposite, by enabling voters to freely ballot for, or “nominate,” acquaintances whom they respect to be their political Proxies.
TTH: “You[r] system has lots of “turns” – steps. Perhaps, “elaborate” is a better word. The steps are supposed to safeguard against corruption , but I think the more steps, the more likelihood of corruption, as each step introduces another opportunity for it.”
The Venetians disagreed—successfully Here’s a quotation from my fifth chapter:
“[In Venice,] to prevent tensions between the ruling families, sortition was introduced as way of appointing a new doge, but in order to ensure only a competent person could become ruler, the procedure was combined with elections. The result was AN UNBELIEVABLY ROUNDABOUT SYSTEM that took place in ten phases over a period of five days….
“The Venetian system SEEMS ABSURDLY CUMBERSOME,, but recently several computer scientists have shown that this leader election protocol is interesting in that it ensured the more popular candidates actually won, while nevertheless giving minorities a chance and NEUTRALIZING CORRUPT VOTING BEHAVIOR. Furthermore, it helped to bring compromise candidates to the fore by amplifying small advantages…. In any case, historians agree, that the extraordinary, lasting stability of the Venetian republic, which endured more than five centuries, until ended by Napoleon, can be attributed in part to the INGENIOUS SELECTION of ballotte.” —David van Reybrouck, Against Elections, 2018, 70-71
Moreover, a simple-sortition Citizens Assembly has nevertheless succumbed to corruption in Ireland, as noted the other day on this site here: https://equalitybylot.com/2024/03/23/irish-citizen-assembly-process-terminates-in-rejection-by-referendum/, where it is said:
“In 2011 O’Malley was part of a group of academics who set up We the Citizens, a precursor to citizens’ assemblies, but he now believes that STATE-FUNDED NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS HAVE CAPTURED THE PROCESS.”
TTH: “you[r] system is time consuming to read through, and you have failed, as far as I’m concerned in providing a need for it.”
OTOH, Keith Sutherland, a prominent denizen here, gave me this pat on the head the other day, after quoting me touting one of my complications:
Roger:> [quotation] “Demiocracy does this by distancing its demi-public Electors from the policy-making fray—their job is to choose among policy-proponents—and by imperiling those of its demi-legislators who succumb to high-minded hubris.”
“YES INDEED. That is a perspective that you share with Alex Kovner and myself. The role of the statistically-representative assembly is to choose between policies proposed elsewhere, rather than to come up with THEIR OWN SUGGESTIONS, which WILL BE SUBJECT TO THE MANIPULATIONS THAT PROFESSOR O’MALLEY OUTLINED.”
Note BTW that it is your Simple Simon System that is not insulated, as mine is, from manipulations.
TTH: “To end on a positive note, you said something to the effect of indigenous people may be the early adopters of Demiocracy. I don’t know about that, but recently the Zapatistas revamped the election system to begin at the level of the neighborhood, and then scale up, somewhat akin to your first step.”
The first bite of the apple?!
You might want to contact them.”
Or THEY might want to contact MEl OR, better, read my chapters and comments.
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TooTheHilt wrote: “Now 17 entries in what is supposedly a blog devoted to equality by lot.”
But it shouldn’t be a mere echo chamber, right? It shouldn’t become a dogged defense of the indefensible, right? It is impossible to defend, using pure sortitionist boilerplate, the CA fiasco in Ireland in March and that of the European Energy Efficiency Panel in February, described at:
https://equalitybylot.com/2024/02/24/european-citizens-energy-efficiency-panel/
Sortition is an essential element of a healthy political system. It worked well, in combination with SMALL-SCALE elections, in Venice. Relied on exclusively—i.e., when the allotted are thrust into achieving a consensus and/or into lawmaking—it can wobble and lose credibility.
There needs to be a division of labor, as Keith has maintained, with allotted citizens sitting in judgment over contending would-be lawmakers. This mirrors the basic structure of our current political system, which should make it easier to transition to.
And there needs to be popular input to the lot-box, so the public can self-sift itself into something it respects, something close to excellence.
“The Best By Ballottery”— there’s a compact credo that SHOULD be this site’s—if it wants sortition to have a seat at the table. A seat at the table is, of course, only “half a loaf”—but “The half is greater than the whole.” (Hesiod)
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PS: Even catchier: “Better By Ballottery”. Pearls like this are seeded by the grit that comes my way here.
Anyone attempting to describe an existing political system to which we’ve become accustomed would find it more complex than Demiocracy. Take a look at JJ McCullough’s outline-sketch of Canada’s, for instance, especially starting just before the 40-minute mark at https://youtu.be/Q9LrjU5n63g?si=68pd3jhYZWsUrU02
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RK: “My objections are 1) that modern publics, unlike those of ancient Athens, have become accustomed to voting as a basic right, and also that they see or imagine the downsides of a mere dragnet scoop through the whole population to obtain lawmakers.”
TTH: “This is your conjecture, which you have admitted to not having any empirical evidence for.”
It’s a well-founded inference from the reluctance of the public to embrace sortition and from its persistence in voting.
:
i could just as easily say that the public is reluctant to embrace Demiocracy, and so wants to continue with electoral política as usual. Of course, the obvious answer is few people have heard of either. I have yet to speak to someone who has heard of sortition. These include, barristers, judges, neuroscientists, a labor relation professor, lawyers, and many others. It is hardly surprising that the public is not clamoring for something they have not heard of.
TTH: “ I’ve never heard anyone that I have introduced sortition to voice the objection that voting is a basic right. I recently asked someone who has spoken to hundreds of people and he estimated the percentage somewhere between 5-10%.”
But the percentage would be over 90% if they were asked if elections are essential to democracy. Elections imply voting. Even proponents of sortition acknowledge the public’s attachment to voting/elections even while they bemoan it.
:
That might be, but 90% would be wrong, wouldn’t they? Nearly everyone knows that Ancient Athens was a Democracy and elections were not essential. Three hundred years ago probably over 90% of Europeans would have stated that African and Native Americans were intellectually and morally inferior to Europeans. Are we supposed to just acquiesce to delusion? Moreover, I’d bet that of those 90%, many would change their mind when informed about sortition. This is how social change begins.
TTH: “Considering that roughly half the people in the US don’t vote in presidential elections …”
Wikipedia says: “Approximately 240 million people were eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election and ROUGHLY 66.1% of them submitted ballots ….”
:
Perhaps you are not aware of this, but the 2020 election turnout was an outlier, much higher than the average which is about 50%. The mail-in ballot explains much of this. The passions for and against Trump may account for some of it.
TTH: “ … it may not be a strongly held view. Also, since voting is a recent phenomena, the cultural conditioning around it could be changed back to where it was for most of the millennia humans have lived in this world.”
But it has been impressed upon the public that its ancestors bled and died for the right to vote, thereby making it sacred; and any perceived impingement at present on voting rights is treated as a grave threat to human rights and reacted to with widespread alarm.
:
It does appear that 50% of the public has no problem foregoing their sacred right that their ancestors bled and died for if it requires that they drive to a polling booth. Moreover look at this:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/
Even though the last three elections had historically, century high, turnout, 63% of the eligible voters did not turn out for all three. Seems there devotion to their sacred values is rather intermittent.
I believe the public can be weaned away from MASS-election voting, but that it is “a bridge too far” to try to remove ALL voting.
:
Yes, another belief you have with no empirical support. I believe that human beings are highly flexible and adaptable beings, of which their is plenty of empirical support, and are capable of adopting many different governmental systems. I would point you to the book by Wengrow and Graeber, The Dawn of Everything, where they present copious evidence of this.
TTH: “Margolin seems to believe that the public wants lawyers to rule. Is he oblivious to polls consistently showing they are among the least trusted professionals?”
That stretches what he said a bit; what he said was: “they [voters] want to be ruled by people whom they perceive (however, mistakenly) as successful, powerful and capable … OFTEN [no more frequently than that] with a background in law.”
:
Yes, often with a background in law. We call those people lawyers, Roger, or judges, who were once lawyers.
TTH: “you[r] system is time consuming to read through, and you have failed, as far as I’m concerned in providing a need for it.”
OTOH, Keith Sutherland, a prominent denizen here, gave me this pat on the head the other day, after quoting me touting one of my complications
:
Yes, you found the one person, in someone else’s post, who made a positive comment about one aspect of your system. I took some time out yesterday to view the comments on your many posts. There was not one positive comment. The most common response was crickets. Then there were a number of critiques which you answered with characteristic voluminous responses until your interlocutor stopped responding. Now you might think, given your propensity to not acknowledge error, that that signals agreement. You might want to rethink that and consider it might be exhaustion or lack of interest.
TTH: “To end on a positive note, you said something to the effect of indigenous people may be the early adopters of Demiocracy. I don’t know about that, but recently the Zapatistas revamped the election system to begin at the level of the neighborhood, and then scale up, somewhat akin to your first step.”
The first bite of the apple?!
You might want to contact them.”
Or THEY might want to contact MEl OR, better, read my chapters and comments.
:
I thought you were serious at first, but I guess that is a joke. Well, I offered the suggestion seriously, as they seem a little bit closer to your system than what people are advocating for on this blog.
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@ toothehilt, on March 26, 2024 at 10:17 pm
Re: “The Dawn of Everything”
Unfortunately, that book lacks credibility and depth.
In fact “The Dawn of Everything” is a biased disingenuous account of human history (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity & https://offshootjournal.org/untenable-history/) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has “progressed” in a linear stage (the “stuck” problem, see below), although not before that (https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This “progress” has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.CovidTruthBeKnown.com or https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we’ve been “stuck” in a destructive hierarchy and unequal 2-class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the “stuck” question — “the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?” or “how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles” — [cited from their book] is the major question in “The Dawn” its authors never really answer, predictably).
Worse than that, the Dawn authors actually promote, push, propagandize, and rationalize in that book the unjust immoral exploitive criminal 2-class system that’s been predominant for millennia [https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/was-david-graeber-offered-a-deal]!
“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord
A good example that one of the “expert” authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title) — see https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
“The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant public who craves myths and fairy tales.
“The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” … just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm.” — Unknown
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TooTheHilt wrote, quoting me in the paragraphs labeled RK; I’ve italicized his comments in earlier rounds; I’ve labeled all his comments as TTH; I’ve boldfaced the RK preceding the first new comment in each exchange; and I’ve separated multi-part exchanges by double lines.
==========
RK: “My objections are 1) that modern publics, unlike those of ancient Athens, have become accustomed to voting as a basic right, and also that they see or imagine the downsides of a mere dragnet scoop through the whole population to obtain lawmakers.”
TTH: “This is your conjecture, which you have admitted to not having any empirical evidence for.”
RK: It’s a well-founded inference from the reluctance of the public to embrace sortition and from its persistence in voting.
TTH: i could just as easily say that the public is reluctant to embrace Demiocracy, and so wants to continue with electoral política as usual. Of course, the obvious answer is few people have heard of either. I have yet to speak to someone who has heard of sortition. These include, barristers, judges, neuroscientists, a labor relation professor, lawyers, and many others. It is hardly surprising that the public is not clamoring for something they have not heard of.
RK: First, here’s a bit of a diversion: a link to a Reddit thread from two years ago that asks, “Why Isn’t Sortition More Popular?” https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/s/F782FyUHgt
Some interesting comments among 128 from persons who, having heard of sortition, mostly aren’t prepared to embrace it to the point of Going Greek—I.e., abandoning voting. Here are portions of some I like:
“I think it’d be worse, if only because random selection doesn’t even vaguely select for competence. The average IQ in Congress, for example, is about 105 (so, smarter than about 62% of the population)… but sortition would have it at zero, including some people who were dumber than 80% of the population.”
—-
“But given the statistics we do have lots of countries were destroyed by having not very bright or talented monarchs inherit.”
—-
“Yeah, I think the whole “randomly selected” thing freaks people out. Anyone who has ever served on a jury knows that it’s possible to make mistakes because there’s one person who bullies people into settling on a verdict. [Hence the allotted should not be the ones legislating, and their discussions should be online, and monitored by the Secretariat, to blunt bullying.—RK]”
—-
“I’m generally in favor of using sortition for one house of a bicameral legislature. Most of the usual objections would not apply in this case. Unfortunately people tend to think sortition = Athens with no compromises.”
—-
“The most popular reading for the topic is Against Elections by David van reybrouck. It’s more of a persuasive book.
Here’s a paper that talks a bit about lottocratic accountability by Alexander Guerrero. There exists something called scihub. Google it.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/papa.12029
Here’s another by Arash Abizadeh:
https://abizadeh.wixsite.com/arash/post-1/article-representation-bicameralism-political-equality-and-sortition
Unfortunately much of the literature about sortition is speculative because we don’t have examples out in the wild yet. There however are many papers that talk about the positive aspects of Citizens’ Assemblies, such as this one:
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/929-utopias-2013/Real%20Utopia%20Readings/Lang-35-7%20-%20Politics%20Society-2007.pdf
The question then is how much of these positive experiences from Citizens’ Assemblies would transfer to a deliberative body with real political power. We’ll never know until we try it out, yet we’ll never try it out unless we advertise/market/propagandize/overstate the benefits.
This guy named Terrill Bouricius also designed a “Multi-body” sortition government system here. In multi-body sortition, the components of legislating are divided up so that a proposal needs to go through a lot of checks before final approval: https://delibdemjournal.org/article/id/428/cdd.stanford.edu also has reports and information about “Deliberative Polling” conducted by James Fishkin. Fishkin also wrote a book about Deliberative democracy and is mostly about political theorizing.”
—-
“…. I’m not against sortition for some things and TBH in a liberal democracy, voting is more an illusion of choice anyway, but … people really care about maintaining that illusion.
“I mean if you look at the US, you have about as much chance of influencing policy as you do in China, but Americans will sign up to die to defend the right to choose between 2 center-right parties, with little chance of reform.
“Sortition is better in just about every way than FPTP, yet I suspect people would fight to the death to protect their right to vote for somebody who will likely ignore them anyway.”
……
[From a different Reddit thread linked to by the one above, namely https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/s/vGAJ2izRnd :
“The main issues with sortition are: Incompetence, Misrepresentation, Illegitimacy, Enthusiasm, Unaccountability according to Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition “
—-
Now to your point about few people having heard of sortition. Influential Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has converted to sortitionism. He has a good chance to get the ball rolling, now that the time is ripe (i.e., a Blond Beast is at the gate, thanks to electorialism). Here are links to two of his January podcasts:
Podcast with Claudia Chwapisz, an influential and persuasive activist globally for CAs, whose prospects she is enthusiastic about, but who also wants them to move beyond being merely advisory:
https://equalcitizens.us/s5e23-lifeboats-claudia-chwalisz/
January 16 podcast with David van Reybrouck at https://equalcitizens.us/s5e21-lifeboats-david-van-reybrouck/
But thousands of potentially influential persons have heard of sortition and not yet acted like Lessig. I think they have misgivings like those I quoted from the Reddit thread.
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TTH: “ I’ve never heard anyone that I have introduced sortition to voice the objection that voting is a basic right. I recently asked someone who has spoken to hundreds of people and he estimated the percentage somewhere between 5-10%.”
RK: But the percentage would be over 90% if they were asked if elections are essential to democracy. Elections imply voting. Even proponents of sortition acknowledge the public’s attachment to voting/elections even while they bemoan it.
TTH: That might be, but 90% would be wrong, wouldn’t they? Nearly everyone knows that Ancient Athens was a Democracy and elections were not essential. Three hundred years ago probably over 90% of Europeans would have stated that African and Native Americans were intellectually and morally inferior to Europeans. Are we supposed to just acquiesce to delusion? Moreover, I’d bet that of those 90%, many would change their mind when informed about sortition. This is how social change begins.
RK: But what we abandoned were “luxury beliefs”—dumping them cost little or nothing. Dumping the right to vote would deprive us of a power to peacefully dismiss a would-be tyranny. Just because many persons don’t exercise their right to vote in ordinary circumstances doesn’t mean they don’t value it as an emergency backup for that situation. And the right to vote is different from those luxury beliefs because it has been sacralized, and also because voting rights has become a central issue in recent years in America in various ways.
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TTH: “Considering that roughly half the people in the US don’t vote in presidential elections …”
RK: Wikipedia says: “Approximately 240 million people were eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election and ROUGHLY 66.1% of them submitted ballots ….”
TTH: Perhaps you are not aware of this, but the 2020 election turnout was an outlier, much higher than the average which is about 50%. The mail-in ballot explains much of this. The passions for and against Trump may account for some of it.
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TTH: “ … it may not be a strongly held view. Also, since voting is a recent phenomena, the cultural conditioning around it could be changed back to where it was for most of the millennia humans have lived in this world.”
RK: But it has been impressed upon the public that its ancestors bled and died for the right to vote, thereby making it sacred; and any perceived impingement at present on voting rights is treated as a grave threat to human rights and reacted to with widespread alarm.
TTH: It does appear that 50% of the public has no problem foregoing their sacred right that their ancestors bled and died for if it requires that they drive to a polling booth. Moreover look at this:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/
Even though the last three elections had historically, century high, turnout, 63% of the eligible voters did not turn out for all three [2018, 2020, and 2022]. Seems there devotion to their sacred values is rather intermittent.
RK: But that doesn’t mean they don’t want retain the right as an emergency method.
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RK: I believe the public can be weaned away from MASS-election voting, but that it is “a bridge too far” to try to remove ALL voting.
TTH: Yes, another belief you have with no empirical support. I believe that human beings are highly flexible and adaptable beings, of which their is plenty of empirical support, and are capable of adopting many different governmental systems. I would point you to the book by Wengrow and Graeber, The Dawn of Everything, where they present copious evidence of this.
RK: I believe they’d be MORE flexible and adaptable if the form of sortition on offer included citizen ballot input to the lottery.
John Burnheim, author of The Demarchy Manifesto, stated, in a thread on EBL here in 2016
https://equalitybylot.com/2016/02/08/the-demarchy-manifesto/ , “it is extremely difficult to persuade people to give up their vote.” I suspect he had had some experience in trying to win over “barristers, judges, neuroscientists, a labor relation professor, lawyers, and many others.”
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TTH: “Margolin seems to believe that the public wants lawyers to rule. Is he oblivious to polls consistently showing they are among the least trusted professionals?”
RK: That stretches what he said a bit; what he said was: “they [voters] want to be ruled by people whom they perceive (however, mistakenly) as successful, powerful and capable … OFTEN [no more frequently than that] with a background in law.”
TTH: Yes, often with a background in law. We call those people lawyers, Roger, or judges, who were once lawyers.
RK: But Margolin DIDN’T say the public wants lawyers to rule. That’s your stretcher, as I said above.
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TTH: “you[r] system is time consuming to read through, and you have failed, as far as I’m concerned in providing a need for it.”
RK: OTOH, Keith Sutherland, a prominent denizen here, gave me this pat on the head the other day, after quoting me touting one of my complications
TTH: Yes, you found the one person, in someone else’s post, who made a positive comment about one aspect of your system. I took some time out yesterday to view the comments on your many posts. There was not one positive comment. The most common response was crickets. Then there were a number of critiques which you answered with characteristic voluminous responses until your interlocutor stopped responding. Now you might think, given your propensity to not acknowledge error, that that signals agreement. You might want to rethink that and consider it might be exhaustion or lack of interest.
RK: I was aware that Demiocracy would not be greeted with hosannas here, given its anti-electoralism and egalitarianism. I wasn’t looking for converts but rather for the opportunity to provoke and counter criticisms, for inclusion in my book when it goes public. (Nevertheless, my Chapter 18 has just received two Likes, an encouraging trend. If #19 continues the doubling and garners 4, I’ll achieve unanimity before long! 😏)
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any reason but that they are not already common.” —John Locke
“the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” — Leo Tolstoy
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TTH: “To end on a positive note, you said something to the effect of indigenous people may be the early adopters of Demiocracy. I don’t know about that, but recently the Zapatistas revamped the election system to begin at the level of the neighborhood, and then scale up, somewhat akin to your first step.”
RK: The first bite of the apple?!
TTH: You might want to contact them.”
RK: Or THEY might want to contact MEl OR, better, read my chapters and comments.
TTH: I thought you were serious at first, but I guess that is a joke. Well, I offered the suggestion seriously, as they seem a little bit closer to your system than what people are advocating for on this blog.
RK: I interpreted your recommendation as an unserious “dig” at me. The basic justification for indirectly electing the upper strata of government have been published elsewhere, I suppose, and I doubt that the Zapatistas have added to them—plus those justifications are obvious. (Avoidance of the downsides of mass elections, selection of the better members of the lower chamber, the advantage of having had prior legislative experience, another the guaranteed promotion of members of a regional party.)
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In November 1983 I visited and told the computer language (COBOL) standards committee (CODASYL) that there would be an expensive, $40 billion Y2K problem down the road unless it added a DATE data type, to enable programs to fake it past the year 2000 with 6-digit dates, using a virtual turn of the century technique. By starting early, the conversion work could have been piggybacked on ordinary maintenance work and done in time, without expensive rush work.
They stared unbelievingly when I uttered my figure, which turned out to be only 15% of the actual conversion cost, and unanimously rejected my proposal.
I also told them that the reason many companies were not defecting to tempting, higher-productivity, proprietary languages was the high cost of migrating away from Cobol. If faced with a similarly high cost to remain with Cobol, many would take the opportunity to abandon ship. This also occurred, but my prediction likewise went over like a lead balloon.
If the membership had consisted of working programmers, instead of compiler writers and managers, I think I’d have won. This has bolstered my enthusiasm for entrusting “grunts” to insiderhood and power everywhere.
My bigger point is that I’m undaunted by the universal silent opposition that TTH claims exists here. I’m inclined to interpret it, if it exists, as a similar confederacy of dunces.
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PS: IBM implemented this data-type solution in the mid-Nineties, when it was too late to be really useful, because most companies needed to be converted years in advance, owing to the way many date-computations looked forward, and owing to all the extra conversion work that had piled up in the interim.
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> a similar confederacy of dunces
We get here at Equality-by-Lot a steady flow of self-appointed reformers who devise and offer grand plans of great profundity, often appreciated by no one but themselves. The notion that they are true visionaries unappreciated by the multitude cannot of course be dismissed. (Although their visions are often mutually exclusive, so they cannot be all true visionaries at the same time.)
Indeed, I guess we are all here eccentrics to some extent, spending our time conversing about an abstract topic with little chance of having a direct or indirect gain from it, so maybe having a high occurrence of true visionaries is to be expected.
I guess for me the one real hope of direct gain is to have on this forum a conversation which is intellectually stimulating. This occasionally (although too rarely) does happen. Being lectured at length and repeatedly about the wonders of some system, with no real attempt to engage with my own arguments, is surely not such a stimulating conversation.
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Yoram: “The notion that they [“self-appointed reformers”] are true visionaries unappreciated by the multitude cannot of course be dismissed.”
Here’s Demiocracy’s key reform, which you haven’t attempted to dismiss. On March 4, in the last paragraph of my penultimate reply to you under Chapter 12, I cited two applications of my ballottery technique whose importance I challenged you to object to. If you cannot do so—and over a month has passed since I posted it—then you should “appreciate” it as a genuine “social invention,” and thus the product of a “true vision,” and hence should not presumptively dismiss the rest of demiocracy as a crankish “grand plan.”
What I wrote was, “do you have any objections to the Demiocratic election of union officials and board of director members? Or to the elevation, via the bal-lottery, of Inner Voice Entities by currently voiceless soldiers, prisoners, and employees? Even if Demiocracy achieved nothing more, implementing one or other of the above would be a tremendous social advance.”
The ballottery enables the representation, previously impossible, of certain “voiceless” groups like soldiers, prisoners, and white-collar American employees. Representatives chosen by a plain lottery would too often not be up to the task of being effective spokesmen, and they would lack the legitimacy provided by a ballot-backing that they’d need to be credible spokesmen in the eyes of the officials over them.
Members of a labor union would be better able to oversee and control their officials if they did so “virtually,” via a body of continuously overseeing Proxy Electors chosen by a ballottery, instead of trying to control them by scarcely-involved mass voters. (Of course the overseeing Proxy Electors could be chosen by lot instead. But still Demiocracy’s indirect election of officeholders would be employed.)
———-
And there’s even more scope for the ballottery. There has long been a hankering after a method of governmental elections free of the party system, of mediocre professional party politicians, and of their propaganda. But:
“The fact is, however, that no practical substitute for the present type of representative government, with its dependence on the system of permanent party organizations, has yet been devised….” —James Hogan, Election and Representation, 1945, p. 55.
The “ballottery” is that substitute. It transfers “agency” from the parties to the populace. Campaigning is forbidden, and any “ballotted” person who receives too many ballotts, or who is found not to have been an actual personal acquaintance of his nominator, is disqualified. Every sector of the public, including the poor and the disadvantaged, has agency to freely select the “best men” it knows.
The ballottery then randomly draws its “best allotteds” from those citizens who were nominated by their peers. This enables elections without political parties, and without campaigning (or with only an ineffectual bit of it among acquaintances). It enables “the office to seek the man.”
(Note: For more reasons why office-seeking would be ineffectual, or could easily made so, see my first comment in Chapter 2 below this link: January 14, 2024 at 12:33 am )
Forget everything else about Demiocracy—its supposed “complexities”—and consider this one feature alone. The ballottery technique provides a long-sought breakthrough in democracy and political science.
In addition:
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What else is there in what I’ve written that you should “appreciate”? How about my criticisms of the mass-electoralist system, which I call DeMockery? These occupy about 20% of my text, primarily in chapters 1a, 1b, 4, & 12-15. Sortitionists of every variety should enjoy the following concise, comprehensive, and quotable indictment, from 1b:
“My diagnosis is that the ills of modern representative democracy are due to its large scale, which promotes the growth and influence of certain of democracy’s ancillary components—the six “Pernicious P’s”—to the point where they largely displace and/or distort the general will. The six are:
“Also accompanying modern democracy’s expanding scale is the growth of “Dolorous D’s” among the citizenry, which influence the average voter to Diminish his/her political involvement, thereby further Displacing the general will:
The P’s & D’s then interact with one another, further muddying the situation.
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Next, about half the “wonders” I claim for Demiocracy are ones it shares with your plain vanilla sortition: for instance, dispensing with mass elections and their ancillary Pernicious P’s, and elevating and empowering the common man. So you should have no cause for complaint about that material, regardless of its lengthiness.
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1 One of Demiocracy’s complex features, which I here begin to discuss, to which you objected earlier is its assignment of the ballotted to electoral colleges rather than to legislatures. Here is a more extensive list of reasons why:
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2 Topical specialization is no more complicated than our existing (American) governmental structure, to which it is fitted. (This might not be familiar to readers whose parliamentary systems lack standing special-topic committees.)
Google says, “the 117th Congress passed 365 bills between 2021 and 2023,” or about 180 per year, or one every other day. A single electorate couldn’t drink from that firehouse and really understand what the impact of the bills would be. Comprehension could only be achieved, and the workload reduced to the bearable, if there were separate electorates, say 18, corresponding to the special-topic congressional committees that gestate these bills.
I spell out the details in the latest-posted Chapter, #18—“Special-topic Demi-legislatures,” at:
https://equalitybylot.com/2024/03/29/demiocracy-chapter-18-special-topic-demi-legislatures/
3 Intramural ballotteries. Each Proxy Electorate would conduct a ballottery among itself to select some of its members to elevate to the Proxy Electorate that elects legislators to the all-topic, “full house” legislature, the one that gives the bills passed by committees a second look. This is a more important job, so it is proper that the electors responsible for it be seasoned and select.
4 “Stacked” electorates (optional). Some electors selected by that intramural ballottery would be promoted upwards, e.g., from the state to the national level. This is to take advantage of whatever special-topic knowledge they’ve acquired, of their “seasoning” in penetrating the arguments of candidates, and of their presumptive capability and representativeness, based on their being “selected”—i.e., winners of the draw.
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What’s so objectionable about all those alleged complexities? They aren’t all that complicated. They don’t constitute a towering baroque monstrosity, like Venice’s. Which, despite that characteristic, or because of it, was a great success. (See Chapter 5–“Histories Hints: The Venetian Republic’s Electoral Procedures,” at https://equalitybylot.com/2024/01/25/demiocracy-chapter-5-historys-hints-the-venetian-republics-electoral-procedures/ )
Less could be justly said at the end of the day against a system with such complexities than against other schemes of government—especially ones whose simplicity left them open to degeneration. For example, early democrats’ elect-a-legislator-to-a-legislature-and-be-done-with-it solution has morphed into the problem of our demonic DeMockery. Systems need to be thought through and fleshed out in advance, at length if necessary.
Seemingly simple electionism would sound as complex as Demiocracy if all the details it implies were spelled out. E.g., Voter registration. Primaries. Ballot access. Proportional Representation. Polling places. Election Day and hours. Campaign finance laws. Observers.
Sortition also has subterranean complications or gaps, such as biased recruitment, biased tutelage, biased agenda-setting, mandatory participation if allotted, stratification, etc.
Marx was one who avoided tedious governmental details—the state would wither away. Lenin waved aside the How To of management—any worker or workers council could run an enterprise. A wishful belief that was catastrophically wrong.
What obsessed that pair was suppressing their enemies, whose bourgeois thinking and influence were, they thought, the only real obstacles to a new dawn for humanity.
I suspect a similar psychology exists in many or most of sortitionists here. Their “bogies” are electionism and elitism. Expunge them and “good outcomes” will result. They valorize egalitarianism.
But Demiocracy’s ballottery incorporates those bogies: its lot-infused balloting procedure would elect allotteds whom the public regards as superior, and they would be, because of that, an elite. It would be an elite that the public would not only look up to, but that would, because of its actual superior quality, deliver better outcomes than an egalitarian lottocracy. Both bogies would legitimize Demiocracy—and offend lottocrats:
A really new idea affronts current agreement. —White’s Observation
All great truths begin as blasphemies. —George Bernard Shaw
I suspect this affront to the core values of certain lottocrats is what lies behind their coolness to Demiocracy, not its complexity or lack of transparency, etc. They don’t want to hear about it—their ears have walls.
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Yoram: “We get here at Equality-by-Lot a steady flow of self-appointed reformers who devise and offer grand plans of great profundity, often appreciated by no one but themselves.”
But that doesn’t justify a knee-jerk rejection of the next one to come along. Most new patents will not be successful, or even reach the marketplace, but a few winners—analogously, maybe Demiocracy—will be among them.
Here are a few quotations in defense of far-out, outspoken social inventors and their potentially winning inventions:
A man with a new idea is a Crank, until the idea succeeds. —Mark Twain
When you’re one step ahead of the crowd, you’re a genius. When you’re two steps ahead, you’re a madman. —Shlomo Riskin
The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him .,,, — Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1899
The state begins by being absolutely a work of the imagination. Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man. —Ortega y Gasset
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. —Alfred North Whitehead
E.g., the blending and reconciliation of two basic and hitherto conflicting methods, the ballot and the lottery.
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“… with no real attempt to engage with my own arguments, is surely not such a stimulating conversation.”
But I DID! See my responses to your comments in the Chapter 12 thread (referenced above in regard to representing the voiceless) here: https://equalitybylot.com/2024/02/27/demiocracy-chapter-12-common-man-demos-overseers-of-and-electorates-for-governmental-officials/
To summarize, you said that Demiocracy is too complex to be appealing, and that its complexities would defeat transparency, enabling insiders to engage in corruption. My replies I consider to be well-thought-out and extensive—which readers can judge for themselves, and then revile them back here.
I have subsequently thought of a something I should have pointed out: The interest of the officeholder’s critics and future electoral opponents in detecting and exposing his corruption. These critics would have scheduled speaking time after his semi-monthly reports. That provides a sort of internal immune system.
Furthermore, his critics among the ballotted electors overseeing him would be able to commission an investigation of anything suspicious, or even anything that they are merely curious about, by professional investigators. The voting threshold for launching an investigation would be low—say one-third or one-quarter of the electorate.
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Here are more instances of my engagement with your criticisms. In response to my Chapter 1, at https://equalitybylot.com/2024/01/08/demiocracy-a-demos-dominant-democracy-part-1/ , you wrote: ““I agree that it is the scale that make elections inherently oligarchical. In a group where everybody knows everybody, elections can work. However, the large scale is a fact of modern life – indeed it is a fact of life in any society that is not prehistorical.”
I replied: “There is no inherent obstacle in modernity to downsizing our electorates to make them small, equally-reachable, level playing fields for all candidates, both rich and poor.”
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In response to my Chapter 1b, at https://equalitybylot.com/2024/01/12/demiocracy-chapter-1b-the-mass-electoral-system-is-the-problem/ , you wrote: “No sane person would spend a significant effort for a 1-in-a-million share in decision making. … a group of 1,000,000 people is a mass group. It cannot meaningfully set an agenda because it cannot deliberate and coordinate.”
I replied: “NO PROBLEMO! I wrote, in Chapter 1b [i.e., above his comment]: “My prescription is to “de-mass-ify” democracy by downsizing and dividing the electorate into MULTIPLE, issue-specific “Demi” (SMALL) ELECTORATES each responsible for a single electee.”
Next, you wrote, “those who set the agenda will be an elite group and this elite group will have a decisive share of the decision making power.”
I replied: “I have four responses: 1) Proxy Electorates are not legislators, so they’re not, strictly speaking, decision makers. 2) Their agenda is largely pre-set by their topical specialty (e.g., Health, Education, Welfare, etc.). 3) The sub-topics up for discussion will be familiar to Electors from their dozen or more prior gatherings. IOW, any agenda setting will not be dealing with a naive audience that might be easily led by the nose. 4) Gatherings will be mostly free-form, not agenda-structured. The Secretariat will open with anything it has to say, like “old business,” etc., the group’s legislator will make a report, his shadow legislators will critique it, Electors will ask questions of them all, investigators will make reports, It will all be very democratic. 😇”
You wrote, “But if you expect an effort measured in few hours per month or less, then this makes the task you assign to them even less likely to be realistic. How would they ever be able to develop an independent understanding of the issues …”
Proxy Electors will have only 5% as many issues to wrestle with as current voters, because of their topical specialization, making learning easier. And they will be devoting, in those few hours per month, ten times more than the average voter today is spending, making a Demi arrangement a big improvement. Their repeated gatherings over the course of their six-year (say) terms will tend to make what they learned stick. Plus their intranet will provide them with transcripts and recordings of prior gatherings, as well as access to most online writings on their topic, and the assistance of the Secretariat’s research librarians. Electors who wish to can delve deep, and then share what they’ve found with the other members. Thus Demi Electorates will be roughly 10 times more learned on their topic, and 5 times less manipulated by undemocratic forces, than current mass-electors.
“… and their own ideas …”
Proxy Electors will be able to converse among themselves in a way that all Electors can hear, unlike current voters.
“… rather than be essentially dominated by the elites, much as the voters are?”
The influence of unrepresentative ancillary entities, aka elites, via their endorsements, propaganda, and funding, will be almost eliminated within the Intranet of a Proxy Electorate. That’s because campaigns directed at a small, all-present audience will cost nearly nothing (“a mere bag of shells,” as Ralph Cramden would say). No party hack or captured “catspaw” who is exposed to the probing of his critics and constituents for years before an election will be guaranteed a win—or even a single vote.
You wrote, “Whether they vote en masse on some proposals or work in small groups on different issues and then the outcomes are aggregated in one way or another is immaterial.”
But Electors are NOT “voting on proposals,” they are evaluating candidates. The legislators that get elected do the voting on proposals. And those Demi-legislatures needn’t “aggregate” their decision making with the twenty or so other legislatures in their jurisdiction that deal with different topics—why should they?
You wrote, “Whatever outcomes come out of the process are going to necessarily reflect an agenda that is created in an undemocratic way in which some elite sub-group … dominates the process.”
I can’t deny that there will occasionally be some manipulation of “the process,” but it won’t be powerful or systemic the way it is now, under the influence of the Pernicious P’s. I guess it’ll be opportunistic, mostly. Further, as I explained in my Reply just above this one, there won’t be much of an “agenda” involved in gatherings of Proxy Electors. They will deal with whatever matters members and candidates freely bring up.
———
You quoted me and responded:
Roger: “democracy’s revolutionary founders would be agonized to see it now”
Yoram: “While it is a good bet that the American revolutionaries would not be particularly impressed with the modern system, attributing to them democratic ideals is utterly a-historical.”
I replied at length, conceding much, but concluding: “What they really wanted, implicitly, was a system in which “the office seeks the man.” This is what the “chosen by their neighbors” passage by Wilmoore Kendall was suggesting:
“… its Framers intended it [Congress] to be … a deliberative assembly made up of uninstructed men, chosen by their neighbors because they are ‘virtuous’ men.”
“They just didn’t realize how a mass-election system is unable to operate that way for long, and how vulnerable it is to partisan divisiveness and factional manipulation.
“The “ballottery” is what they would endorse now, were they here today, as it is the only way to provide neighbors—i.e., the citizenry, the embodiment of the general will—with agency, and to recapture agency from the Perniciours P’s that have usurped
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