Gary Gutting: Should We Cancel the Election?

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Mark Fredrickson found a post of his on the New York Times online opinion pages. The post is set up as a dialog between the author and Socrates. It is a typical mix of valid points and elitist dogma.

SOCRATES: I’m against it.

GUTTING: I see what you mean. It’s going to be nasty, brutish, and long — not to say immensely expensive — but of course if we want a democracy, there’s no alternative.

S: I disagree. You shouldn’t hold the election at all. You should flip a coin instead.

G: You don’t see any difference between Obama and Romney?

S: Oh, I do. I’m very impressed with Obama, no question. He’s intelligent, courageous, self-controlled and has a good sense of justice. Just the sort of person I had in mind for my philosopher-rulers. But none of that’s going to make a difference to the American voters. The election’s likely to be close, and in any case the outcome will turn on the October unemployment report, the price of gas, an Israeli attack on Iran, who has the most money for attack ads in the last two weeks or some other rationally irrelevant factor that you don’t yet have any hint about.

G: But surely you’d prefer to let Obama make his case to the American people rather than let blind chance decide the outcome?

S: I think letting the American people decide is no different from leaving it to chance. The vast majority of you don’t know enough about the issues or the candidates to make anything like a reliable decision. (It was the same in Athens in my day.)
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Online discussion of lottery voting

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Jon Roland writes:

I will be on along with Eric Liu, former Clinton speechwriter and adviser, and others.

Here’s the link to the topic we’ll be discussing:

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1963&context=fss_papers

Other sites for this topic:
http://sortition.net
http://constitution.org/cs_elect.htm

Watch us on @HuffPostLive tonight, 8/13/12, 8:00pm CT live.huffingtonpost.com

Filed under: Elections, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Exclusions

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Historically, voting rights have gone through a process of expansion from being exclusive to a minority to being quite inclusive. Interestingly, proposals for sortition-based government often come with various exclusion mechanisms. Such mechanisms can be classified by the stage at which they operate:

1. Pre-selection. These exclusions operate much like exclusions from suffrage did, and still do to some extent. Some general bureaucratic criteria are defined and all those who are determined to fall within those criteria are excluded from the sortition pool. Examples are the following groups: children, felons, non-citizens, those who do not take some sort of a loyalty oath, and citizens who are not registered (to vote, or to the sortition pool).

2. At selection. Qualification tests are administered at selection time, and only those who pass them are allowed to become delegates. Examples are: literacy tests and civics tests.

3. Post-selection. These are mechanisms for removal of serving delegates. Examples are popular recall or removal by a scrutinizing body.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Sortition | 129 Comments »

Open letter: Sortition as a tool of democracy

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Dear Mr. Scialabba,

I am writing to you following your article “Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy”. I am a committed sortition supporter and advocate and a member of a group of like-minded people. We have a blog – Equality by Lot (https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com) – devoted to discussing and promoting sortition as a tool of democracy.

I liked your article a great deal. Articles discussing sortition in one way or another appear occasionally in the mainstream press (you can find a running record of such articles on Equality by Lot – the most prominent of these is Joe Klein’s 2010 Time article ”How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?”). I think yours was substantially different.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 22 Comments »

Scialabba: Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Yoram Gat

George Scialabba writes in the LA Review of Books and in Salon about the history of plutocratic control of elections in the U.S. and offers sortition as an alternative.

Scialabba has the following excerpt from the 1897 book Equality by Edward Bellamy:

“But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?” […]
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Japan’s energy future too important to be left to experimental polling method

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Yoram Gat

An opinion piece in The Mainichi:

Yoroku: Japan’s energy future too important to be left to experimental polling method

Once upon a time, in ancient Athens, state policy was decided not by elected representatives, but by a great assembly of all eligible citizens. Five hundred of these citizens were also chosen by lot for the Bouletai, or council, which spent time deliberating the issues facing Athens and drawing up bills for the assembly’s consideration.

In the modern world, a small-scale version of this selection by lot and the group deliberation that was such an important part of Athenian democracy is being resurrected by U.S. academics in the form of deliberative polls.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Nissani: Cheers for Direct Democracy

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Dr. Moti Nissani writes in The Dissident Voice:

Revolutionary strategists must ask themselves: How can we best structure our own movement? And: What kind of political framework should we aim for, once we relegate the Banking-Militarist Complex to the dustbin of history? The answer to both questions is the same: genuine (or direct) democracy.

Democracy, for the Greeks who coined the word, meant “power of the people” or “rule of the people.” Perhaps the best-known example of a genuine democracy in a highly-advanced, highly-literate, polity, is Athens and its sister democracies of Ancient Greece. There, all significant political, legal, and judicial decisions were made directly by the people. Democratic Athens went to war if, and only if, the majority so voted; a man was exiled, or condemned to death, if, and only if, his fellow citizens so decreed.

It is a typical reformist treatment of the Athenian system. Sortition is discussed in the context of juries, but its application to political offices is given barely a mention:

The Athenians knew that power-seekers could not be trusted, so they filled many important public offices by lot. Moreover, most office holders maintained their positions for extremely short durations. Athens thereby bypassed, to a certain extent, a key problem in all other extant political systems: The ascendancy of the psychopaths.

Filed under: Athens, History, Participation, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Klirosi posters

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Klirosi sent a couple of election posters they created with the titles “It’s us or them” and “See the future”:

Filed under: Elections, Sortition | Leave a comment »

κλήρωση

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Yoram Gat

κλήρωση, Greek for “lottery” or “drawing of lots” (as Google Translate tells me), is a Greek website advocating sortition.

The site presents sortition as follows (Google Translate, with some of my own touch-ups):

The Lottery

We know that you are tired of political parties and politicians. You do not want to see them, let alone hear them: tell you what you want to hear in order to gain power, and then pursue government policies other than those that were voted for.

You wonder what is the reason to vote…

The lottery is a way to finally achieve a truly representative democracy. To solve a problem that is not only Greek, but global. Greece can be talked about everywhere, not a corrupt country, but as a country of innovation, leadership and democracy. An example to follow.

Just do not expect saviors. Just believe in yourself.

Sortition is aimed at regeneration of the democratic political system based on the belief that only democracy can lead to improving the lives, dignity and ολβιότητας[?] of the Greeks. The basic principle of the movement coincides with one of the basic principles of democracy as implemented by Solon, Cleisthenes, Pericles and was described by Thucydides and Aristotle.

The Republic is achieved not solely through elections, but especially through sortition.

Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »

Opportunity for easy online activism

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Yoram Gat

David Grant wrote to draw attention to an online proposition and voting exercise at Slate magazine. Readers are asked to propose pieces of reform for the U.S. constitution and to vote for their favorite proposals.

David wrote a proposal titled “Use sortition, not elections, for a Citizen House“.

Browsing around at random, I found a similar proposal: “Select our representatives by lottery“.

Voting for those proposals is an easy way to highlight the idea of sortition. Registration to the site (free and easy) is needed in order to vote. You can vote more than one proposal.

Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 20 Comments »

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