Tyler Brown from Reading, Pennsylvania, writes the following in a letter to The Reading Eagle:
Your Oct. 23 editorial (“Be prepared when casting votes this fall”) claims that it’s time to get ready to make an informed vote. But being informed makes no difference. A candidate’s decision to run for office is disqualifying in itself.
People do not run for office for altruistic reasons, they run because they are power hungry ne’er-do-wells seeking to leech off productive members of society. Even the most blameless person would be corrupted by our dirty, money-laden election process.
The simplest fix would be to make a non-vote count as a vote for sortition. Consider that in 2020 there were about 255 million U.S. citizens. Roughly 81 million voted for Joe Biden and 74 million for Donald Trump. Another 5 million voted for someone else, bringing the total to about 160 million.
Therefore about 95 million citizens did not vote at all. Why should their voice not count? They all saw the candidates, considered all options and decided not to vote. Biden was about 14 million votes short. In such a case the office should be filled by random draw much like jury duty.
If a candidate cannot even win a plurality of their constituents, then what real claim can they possibly have to hold office? The very inventors of democracy, the Athenians, considered sortition to be the test of a democracy. They considered voting to be oligarchic.
I’d much rather entrust the future of our country to randomly chosen citizens rather than partisan politicians.
In a response, Daniel Jamar writes:
How could sortition ever happen when the only people that would benefit is the general population? Lawyers and politicians make the rules and it would largely put them out of business.
Kline has just published an article calling for replacing elections with sortition.
Winston Churchill said: “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others that have been tried.”
For many of us, this “least worst” argument is getting pretty threadbare, particularly as we watch our democracy sliding further from its defining principles every year.
We know this is due to the rise of the professional politician, whose aim is to promote their own advancement to the exclusion of all else. And to achieve that personal advancement, they have to promote the interests of, essentially, a cadre of multinationals plus Rupert Murdoch. And a few other second-division players like big oil, the unions, lesser Murdoch “lookalikes” and a handful of assorted billionaires. Continue reading →
Many people in the world, yes, they go and vote and choose their government, but their material conditions are not being improved. And in the end, people want to live a better life.
Borrell followed this admission in the inefficacy of elections in achieving the most fundamental political goals with the following bromide:
We have to explain what are the links between political freedom and a better life. […] Our fight is to try to explain that democracy, freedom, political freedom is not something that can be exchanged by economic prosperity or social cohesion. Both things have to go together.
Borrell, however, fails to explain what those supposed links between elections and prosperity are. In fact, as he admits, in reality those links do not exist. It is Borrell himself who tells his audience that “many people” vote without having their conditions improved and that the Chinese system provides prosperity without elections. Moreover, despite Borrell’s assertions to the contrary, the situation of having elections on the one hand and stagnation or deterioration of the quality of life of the average person on the other hand is the norm in the West as well, and indeed worldwide. Thus Borrell’s unreflective faith in the links between elections and prosperity is due purely to his own blindness and to him belonging to an insular elite whose status is justified by the electoralist ideology.
The proponents of “deliberative democracy” have spent decades dredging a this-but-that argumentative quagmire that has yielded nothing of either theoretical or practical value for democracy. One of the prolific underlying springs of sticky material for the quagmire has been the inherent contradiction between two dicta of “deliberative democracy”: mass participation and deliberation. It is very straightforward that masses cannot deliberate. Meaningful deliberation can occur in groups of at most a few hundreds of people (and even at this scale all-to-all deliberation could occur only under very favorable conditions).
Thus, “deliberative democracy” professionals can develop entire careers stirring, pouring and piling the sands of participation and deliberation without ever managing (or, it could be argued, without ever trying) to build any solid structure. Those of us who would suggestthat both mass participation and deliberation are at best tools for good outcomes, rather than sacrosanct goals, are severely chastised for looking for illegitimate “shortcuts”.
Technology is one of the implements that have been routinely used to stir those sticky sands. Over and over again we have been promised that new information technology would allow democracy to go where it has never gone before. Mass education, remote participation, virtual mass discussions, crowd-sourced documents – these and many other unprecedented tools of democracy would be enabled by innovative technology. The fact that such promises go back to the advent of the radio (and probably much farther back) never discourages the prophets of mass participation from promising that the next technological innovation would be the one that would usher in democratic utopia where millions of voices would be heard by millions of people who all make meaningful – equally meaningful – contributions to decision making.
[Podcat co-host Will] Menaker has said that Chapo is meant to be in “marked contrast to the utterly humorless and bloodless path that leads many people with liberal or leftist proclivities into the trap of living in constant fear of offending some group that you’re not a part of, up to and including the ruling class.”
Sortition (mispronounced as “sortion”) made a brief appearance in episode #662 of the podcast, “The Queen” (about 46 minutes and 30 seconds into the show). Sortition is offered as part of a reform of the U.S. political system in which voting is used to select limited-tenure monarchs among celebrities, while “governing is actually carried out by permanent bureaucracies overseen by a rotating cast of essentially jury duty citizens”. The proposer did not indicate the rotation period of the “national service” but noted that, for that period, service would be considered as a full time job and would be paid accordingly.
It turns out that a polling company called Morning Consult runs frequent opinion polls in 22 countries measuring the approval ratings of the top elected officials in those countries.
The polls reveal that as of the first week of October 2022, among the 22 officials rated only 6 have positive net rating (approval minus disapproval). Another interesting finding is that the two most highly rated officials are non-Western: India’s Modi, who is often portrayed in the West as being a proto-authoritarian, or at least as a nasty populist, and Mexico’s López Obrador.
In a recent article Dr. Polyvia Parara made reference to a 2005 book by Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and its Importance for Modern Democracy. It turns out this book is available online.
As always, Hansen is a very useful source of information about democracy in the ancient Greek world. In this book, Hansen focuses less on ancient Greece and more on the connections between ancient Greek democracy and “modern democracy”. Hansen rightly points out that, contrary to what some would have us believe (he cites and quotes Hannah Arendt), there is very little evidence for either institutional or ideological continuity between the two periods.
Hansen focuses first on the ideology.
The classical example that inspired the American and French revolutionaries as well as the English radicals was Rome rather than Greece. Thus, the Founding Fathers who met in Philadelphia in 1787, did not set up a Council of the Areopagos, but a Senate, that, eventually, met on the Capitol. And the French constitution of 1799, designed by Sieyès, had no board of strategoi but a triumvirate of consuls.
The very useful Dutch sortition-focused blog Tegen Verkiezingenreports about a new bachelor’s thesis at Leiden university in the Netherlands titled “Lottery as a democratic instrument?”. The thesis was written by Max Van Duijn, who is the leader of a local political party in the Katwijk municipality named DURF. DURF, which is the biggest party in the municipal council, advocates the application of sortition at the municipal level.
Tegen Verkiezingen provides the following translation of an excerpt from the thesis:
In essence ‘representative democracy’ is not democratic. It’s something fundamentally different. It would be more justified to label it ‘elective aristocracy’. In that sense the contrast between classical and representative democracy is a false one. In fact what we’re talking about is a contrast between democracy (sortition) and aristocracy (elections).
Dr. Polyvia Parara teaches Classics and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. In a recent article in the English edition of the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, Parara argues that modern Western-system states, conventionally known as “democracies”, are in fact a distortion of the original meaning of democracy, since they do not implement “Isopoliteia” – political equality.
Compared to the original meaning of democracy, it is deduced that modern western societies constitute liberal parliamentary republics protecting individual freedoms and granting rights. They are governed by elected representatives, professional politicians that draw legitimacy by the popular vote. Yet, the citizenry remains limited in the private sphere, not constituting a governing body.
Update: demnext.org now has a video of the launch event. There is also a link to an article by Hélène Landemore and Claudia Chwalisz offering sortition as an alternative to the way that the failed Chilean constitutional proposal was generated (and a tweet-thread with a summary in English.)
DemocracyNext is a new organization featuring a “Who’s Who” of the sortition circles. DemocracyNext‘s press release announcing its launch is here. Some excerpts:
DemocracyNext, a new non-profit, non-partisan research and action institute, which announces its foundation this International Democracy Day, 15 September 2022 – aims to actively help this new democratic paradigm take shape and take hold.
“We believe that another democratic future is possible. We want to design and build new institutions where citizens can hold real decision making power,” said Claudia Chwalisz, chief executive of DemocracyNext. “Our point of departure is that the current electoral system is broken beyond repair. An entirely new framework must be based on full participation, citizen representation by lot, and real deliberation.” Continue reading →
Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, i.e., he is the EU’s foreign secretary. In 
The proponents of “deliberative democracy” have spent decades 
The very useful Dutch sortition-focused blog Tegen Verkiezingen 
Dr. Polyvia Parara teaches Classics and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. In 
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