Craig Murray was not allotted to the YourParty conference

4 Responses

Yoram Gat, on November 17, 2025 at 5:22 pm said:

But Barbara Dorn was a lucky winner, and she will use her allotted seat to put her weight against sortition and in favor of elections.

https://x.com/barb1917/status/1989727746004849153

https://substack.com/home/post/p-177007081

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Anonymous, on November 17, 2025 at 5:58 pm said:

This is a structural issue that doesn’t necessarily have to do with sortition. An allotted system could allow (and maybe encourage) volunteers to participate and speak but have no final vote. Too many volunteers? Allotted electoral councils could elect/select who is allowed to participate.

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keithsutherland, on November 18, 2025 at 8:36 am said:

Craig Murray or Barbara Dorn? Assuming it was a fair election (by lot), then nobody can argue that it contravened egalitarian norms (all candidates had equal chance to be allotted). But what has this to do with democracy? Anonymous is right that electoral councils would be necessary to select between the plethora of volunteers. If they would only get to speak, but not vote, this acknowledges the stochastic nature of large-scale random selection (for the voters) but overlooks the fact that high-status volunteers who are gifted orators would have a disproportionate influence and this would contravene egalitarian norms. Randomly selected party members can rightly call themselves delegates; not so with self-selecting persons who “had some things that they very much wanted to say”.

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keithsutherland, on November 18, 2025 at 1:59 pm said:

Basically we need to take Pitkin’s objection to descriptive representation seriously — when someone opens their mouth they are only speaking for themselves — “they had some things that they very much wanted to say”, not as a proxy for a particular social or economic category. This is not the case with voting, as votes can easily and transparently be aggregated and the LLN kicks in with only a few hundred (given the necessary independence). Interesting that even on this forum “electoral councils” [would be needed to] elect/select who is allowed to participate”.

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