A Brown University student proposes sortition at Brown

8 Responses

Roger Knights, on March 19, 2024 at 8:44 am said:

Back in the day, as they say (or said), I (Roger Knights, a year-earlier high school student council president who had become a “recovering politician”) participated, at Columbia, in an agitated group called Action. It succeeded in getting the student body to vote to ABOLISH student government. (But it came back later.)

Since that time (1961), I’ve been pondering how, if we must have such entities, they could be more trustworthy and more representative. The way to do that would seem to be to employ a political system under which “the office seeks the man [or woman].”

H.L. Mencken proposed a lottery (aka sortition) in his rousing 1926 essay, “A Purge for Legislatures.” It is online at Equality By Lot here: https://equalitybylot.com/2018/10/06/mencken-a-purge-for-legislatures/

This converted me, and I wrote the sortition-based article, “Demarchy—small, sample electorates electing officials,” published in Cornucopia of Ideas, the Social Inventions Journal for 2001, pages 237–44. It is online at https://academia.edu/resource/work/38701375

But I subsequently became dissatisfied with pure sortition and so I have “extended” it, as Mencken suggested should be done (he probably recognized its weakness too). I propose (in a series of chapters here on EBL) to conduct the random drawing, not from the entire body of voters, but rather from nominations (or “ballots”), of one or more persons, made by each member of that body. (Lots could be blended in with ballots in some ratio.) I have dubbed this procedure a “ballottery.” IOW, a ballot-based lottery. In my Chapter 9, quoted below, I advocate its use for overseeing and/or electing student councils.

“Let’s start with STUDENT COUNCILS. In most high schools and colleges the student body is so large that few students know any candidate personally. All they know is how the candidates PRESENT themselves in their speeches, campaign posters, and position papers—if they even pay attention to those. (“Student apathy” is common: in one student council election at the [near-to-me] U. of Washington only 15% participated.)

“There is thus no way to vote for someone on the solid basis of personally trusting him/her. On top of which, to some voters, all student-council office-seekers are somewhat untrustworthy because of their power-seeking, and/or because of their over-earnestness about mostly Mickey-Mouse intramural trivialities. (The film “Election” humorously documented some of this.)

“Voters in these large electorates have less “agency” than members of the ballotteried institutions described above [in Chapters 6 & 7: prisoners, soldiers, and employees, at https://equalitybylot.com/2024/01/31/demiocracy-chapters-6-7-demiocratic-representation-of-the-voiceless-by-means-of-a-novel-bal-lottery-technique/] would have, because the latter could freely cast ballots for anyone they like. Students OTOH can’t spontaneously vote for a classmate or roommate. They can’t, in other words, SELECT their choice, but must SETTLE FOR a name that’s on the menu—who’s probably some sort of phony.

“If they COULD select their choice, then “the office would (tend to) seek the man”—and a better, less presuming type of (hu)man would win (via the ballottery). It would be a person who is more representative of the whole, and more respected by the whole (on the whole), which is a worthy consideration in judging between the democratic “cred” (legitimacy) of different voting systems.”

A ballottery is superior to a lottery because: 1) The student body will have “bought in” to it by balloting, giving it more legitimacy; 2) Because the persons chosen would be more respected than mere randos; 3) Because the chosen would tend to be more worthy of respect, likely being better students, or being respected by their fellows in student activities, or even just being more fun at parties; 4) Because the chosen would feel more honored at having been selected, and therefore would more diligently attend to their assignment.

Devilish details: “Students in some cases wouldn’t know the full names of the persons they would like to nominate. So they should be allowed to identify each informally, such as by a description of the class(es) they’re in, where they usually sit, what they look like (perhaps with the aid of a photo), etc. It would not be hard for the vote-counters to work out who is meant, especially with the assistance of the the class’s instructor, the nominator, or even the student body—after an appeal through the school newspaper and/or intranet. There would be only ten to twenty names drawn, making this a manageable matter for the election supervisors.”

I hope this reaches student-agitator Evan Tao somehow—e.g., via Yoram.

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Roger Knights, on March 19, 2024 at 3:12 pm said:

Here are my suggestions if a ballottery is used to “allot” a student council.

1 Each student gets three (3) ballots, cast over the school’s intranet.

Comment: Here are tweaks that could be phased in later, after students are familiar with the basics:

A. Allow five ballots, especially if:

B. Students are allowed to cast one ballot for themselves and/or:

C. Students are allowed to cast up to two (2) or three (3) ballots for a single nominee.

2 “Voting” is a term I prefer to reserve, for clarity, for what the allotted council members would do in choosing officials like the president, secretary, and treasurer, even if they aren’t given that power initially, in a school where the president (who may appoint the other two) remains elected by the student body.

3 More names should be drawn than needed to fill the council’s seats, in order to have a roster of Alternates to appoint in case one of those chosen declines to serve, or resigns later for some reason, or has been drawn and quartered for going Up the Down Staircase.

Comment: an allottee who declines to serve might be allowed to name someone else in his place.

4 In order to be allotted, a nominee’s name must be drawn at least twice, to decrease the odds of him/her being an unrepresentative outlier.

5 Balloting should occur soon after the start of the school year, as is standard now, although this doesn’t give freshmen much chance to get acquainted with classmates. Freshmen could ballot later, with their council seats being unoccupied until then. Or their seats could be filled temporarily by lot.

6 Students who wish to be allottees might be allowed to indicate this by wearing some designated style of hat, or pin, or scarf, or white toga, or horned helmet. These items could be made available from a school locker.

7 Too aggressive office-seeking could be discouraged by disqualifying nominees whose names are drawn too often, i.e., beyond the minimum number required. For instance if a nominee’s name is drawn three times, he/she is “in”—unless his/her name turns up again within the next ten (say) drawings.

8 Council meetings, or some of them, should experimentally be conducted online.

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richwbrown, on March 19, 2024 at 4:19 pm said:

This is an idea long overdue. In my work with Democracy Without Elections (DWE) over the years we’ve had a number of university students approach us with the idea of using sortition to select student governments. Colleges and universities are the ideal environment to further the deliberative democratic experiment. There are models for this and others who are interested in building a movement. I hope Evan Tao can connect with DWE or me personally to network and discuss the possibilities further.

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Roger Knights, on March 19, 2024 at 4:42 pm said:

9 Ballotting could be scheduled near the end of the school year (THIS school year at Brown?!), with the allotted taking their seats in September of the following “year.” incoming freshmen could ballot a few months later.

10 A professor should be enrolled in supervising / overseeing newly seeded Demiocracy in action. He should be able to get an article or two out of it.

Various angles he could write about after looking over all the ballots, are: how students’ popularity profiles correlated with their grades, their athletic accomplishments, their attendance records, their sex, their height, and any other digitally available facts from their academic records.

Also of interest would be how broadly or narrowly ballots are distributed among the studentry, and if there is significant narrowing or broadening at the senior class level, whose members presumably have a broader and deeper familiarity with their fellows.

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Roger Knights, on March 19, 2024 at 11:00 pm said:

Evan: I hope you will connect with Rich Brown (what an appropriate name for your school!), if you haven’t been tempted away from pure sortition by my elaboration of it. Students are not much attached to their right to ballot, which my system preserves, depriving it of a key advantage vs. sortition in the public sector, and making sortition an easy sell in academia.

But that is why I believe that pure, lot-based sortition for student government is a dead end—i.e., not a stepping stone to the necessary next step: representation of the “voiceless”: namely, employees and soldiers. As I argue in Chapters 6 & 7, representatives of those groups need to be motivated and diligent—i.e., unusual, not average—and need to possess the legitimacy conferred by an electoral process to have the political “heft” to go head-to-head against the bosses in their organizations.

Once the voiceless are represented, then the third step can be taken: better representation of so-called “voluntary” groups like union members and others.

After that, the world!—i.e., our governmental representatives.

I believe the ballottery’s embellishments for student councils are simple to explain: 1) The lottery box is filled with ballots instead of random names. 2) Students are given more than one ballot to cast, since presumably they think more than one fellow-student is worthy. 3) Perhaps the president is to be elected by the council instead of the student body.

I repeat the other, less important reasons why I like a ballottery system better, from my first comment: “A ballottery is superior to a lottery: 1) Because the student body would have “bought in” to it by balloting, giving it more legitimacy; 2) Because the persons chosen would be more respected [hence legitimate] than mere randos; 3) Because the chosen would tend to be more worthy of respect, likely being better students, or being respected by their fellows in student activities, or even just being more fun at parties; 4) Because the chosen would feel more honored at having been selected, and therefore would more diligently attend to their assignment.”

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Anonymous, on March 21, 2024 at 7:33 pm said:

Hi, I’m the author of the original article! Thanks so much to the blog hosts for picking me up. It’s a real honor to see my work being reshared. I would definitely encourage everyone reading this to check out Brown Political Review and maybe even subscribe to our print magazine. There are many other high-quality articles by very bright students.

On the topic of student elections, Brown just had our elections for next school year this week. In my opinion, this cycle has shown more than ever the inadequacy of the current system. Of the 14 candidates for the Finance Board, only 3 are women.

There are two candidates for student council president, and student voters don’t seem very excited about either. One has, let’s just say, markedly left-wing views and an ambitious policy agenda. I personally voted for her, but others find her views alienating and her agenda unrealistic. I believe the other candidate is running for president for Tik Tok clout. It’s a good thing real governments aren’t run this way! Oh, wait…

Sortition is the way to go!

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Roger Knights, on March 21, 2024 at 10:02 pm said:

I just received an email from Evan Tao, in response to an email I sent him alerting him to the extract from his article here on EBL, and containing my first comment atop this thread. His email included this paragraph:

“However, I fear that it [a ballottery system] wouldn’t solve the problems of elections being popularity contests which favor extraverted and type A candidates. I think [“like” was probably meant] the suggestion of using subtle pins for candidates to advertise themselves, but it would definitely be necessary for a culture to develop that discourages open campaigning and postering of the type we have now.”

Here are five tweaks that would lessen the odds of Type A types being selected by a ballottery. Not all of them would be necessary, I hope:

1 Give each balloter a large number of ballots (say, 8) to cast, making the effort of garnering a ballot from him/her less rewarding. (Because it will be diluted by all his other ballots.) Spreading out the number of nominees will tend to capture more retiring folks in the net.

2 Allow balloters to cast one or more votes for themselves. Since Type A people are only 10% of the population, their ballots for themselves would be swamped by the self-nominations of others—even if others self-nominate at a lower rate.

3 Disqualify persons who receive too many nominations, as follows (quoting from item 7 in my second comment above):

“Too aggressive office-seeking could be discouraged by disqualifying nominees whose names are drawn too often, i.e., beyond the minimum number required. For instance if a nominee’s name is drawn three times, he/she is “in”—unless his/her name turns up again within the next ten (say) [subsequent] drawings.”

4 Posters and other forms of campaigning could either disqualify a person or, less punitively, increase the number of subsequent draws after his being “in” (as described in item 1 above), during which he would be disqualified if his name turned up again. This would increase the likelihood of disqualification.

5 Allow balloters to cast one or more Blackball Ballots, which would tend to target annoyingly “popular” Big Men On Campus (BMOCs). If one or more such BBs appears during the drawing, that anti-nominee would either be disqualified, or would need to have his name drawn again the required number of times in the remainder of the drawing process. Experience will indicate how to fine-tune the details. (BTW, “I never knew a politician who hadn’t been a BMOC.”—said by one of the Alsop brothers, political columnists in my salad days,)

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Foley and Yoon: Sortition for the Student Assembly at the College of William and Mary | Equality by lot, on May 11, 2024 at 12:12 pm said:

[…] two months ago, Evan Tao proposed applying sortition to selecting the student body of a Brown University. A similar proposal is now […]

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