Action | Equality by lot

Why Citizen Juries should decide Canada’s Voting Method and Election Rules

Posted on August 7, 2016 by Simon Threlkeld

A brief by Simon Threlkeld to Canadian House of Commons Electoral Reform Committee, July 26, 2016, briefly explains why election rules, including those setting out the voting method, should be decided by jury, not by politicians or a referendum, and how such a jury approach to democratically deciding election rules could work.

4. Were there no good democratic alternative to politicians deciding the election rules, then perhaps we would be stuck with that very flawed approach. However, there is an excellent and highly democratic way to decide the rules, namely by using citizen juries, or as they can also be called, minipublics or citizens’ assemblies.

(In his brief to the Committee Dennis Pilon has some interesting things to say about referendums and how electoral reform in Canada has long been blocked by the self-interest of politicians. All of the briefs the Committee has posted so far at their website are good, it seems to me. Mine is so far as I know the only one they have received recommending that election rules be decided by citizen juries.)

Filed under: Academia, Action, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Sortition merchandise

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Yoram Gat

One way to advocate for sortition is to wear its messages or display them on your bag, phone case, etc. It turns out that there are various websites that make it quite easy nowadays to create merchandise with your favorite designs and distribute it worldwide.

I just created T-shirts with the “voting is the problem” cartoon that I made some time ago. Feel free to buy those shirts for yourself or for your friends and family and wear them proudly to disseminate the sortition message. Please let me know if you would prefer different merchandise with the same design.

Admittedly, this is a very amateurish design, but if Equality-by-Lot readers see fit maybe we can raise some money to fund the creation of professional designs. Also, if readers have designs they made that they would like to contribute, please let me know.

BTW, I make absolutely no money from the sale of those shirts. Things could be set up, however, so that some money from the proceeds of the sales go to the designer and such money can then be used to fund various activities associated with promoting sortition, such as the creation of more and better designs.

Filed under: Action, Elections, Sortition | 1 Comment »

What is a G1000? (Cambridge and London events)

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Brett Hennig

The Sortition Foundation is organising two free events (in London and Cambridge): What is a G1000?

Cambridge, from 7-9pm, on Friday 10th June at Friends Meeting House (12 Jesus Ln, Cambridge, CB5 8BA) Please RSVP here or on Facebook.
London, from 2-4pm, on Saturday 11th June at The Water Poet (9-11 Folgate St, Spitalfields, London, E1 6BX) Please RSVP here or on Facebook.

Our aim is to hold one G1000 in London and one in Cambridge in late 2016 or early 2017. As such we are organising these two information sessions “What is a G1000?” with the founders of the Dutch G1000, Harm van Dijk and Jerphaas Donner.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Sortition – Part 2: the book, the AGM, and a strategy

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Brett Hennig

Here’s the latest on the new book on sortition, and two events in London next week: the Citizens’ Parliament strategy meeting, and the Sortition Foundation’s first Annual General Meeting.

The book: The End of Politicians is over half-way to being funded! It also has a new review by Professor John Gastil from Penn State University (author of Democracy in Small Groups) which you can read on Unbound: https://unbound.co.uk/books/the-end-of-politicians. If another 80 people pledge and pre-order the book it will be published.
The AGM: The first Sortition Foundation Annual General Meeting will be held at 6pm on Wednesday April 6^th at Rasa Restaurant (6 Dering St, Mayfair, London W1S 1AD). Please RSVP if you intend to come along.
The Citizens’ Parliament Strategy meeting: (http://www.citizensparliament.uk/) will be held from 1-4pm on Wednesday April 6^th at Le Pain Quotidien (16 North Audley St, Mayfair, London W1K 6WL). Please RSVP if you wish to come along.

Read on for more details on all of the above.

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Filed under: Action, Books, Sortition | Leave a comment »

First meeting of Sortition Ireland

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Garreth McDaid has announced the first meeting of an organization he calls “Sortition Ireland”. The meeting is to take place in Dublin on April 12th at 8pm. Virtual attendance will also be possible.

[Via Google Alerts.]

Filed under: Action, Sortition | 2 Comments »

#LordsReform – Let the People Decide

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Brett Hennig

From the Sortition Foundation blog: http://www.sortitionfoundation.org/lords_reform_let_the_people_decide

Sortition certainly sounds good to us – but how do we get from here to there?

The Sortition Foundation has released a Draft Strategy Document outlining some ideas. The first campaign proposal is a call for a Citizens’ Parliament on House of Lords Reform (http://www.citizensparliament.uk/). The campaign, to be officially launched later this year, will call on the UK government to constitute and empower a 650-member, random though representative sample of ordinary citizens to consider, research, deliberate on, and then make a House of Lords Reform proposal, to then be put to a national referendum. You can already sign the open letter calling for a Citizens’ Parliament on Lords Reform.

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Filed under: Action, House of Lords, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Democratic Innovation on Postwaves

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Adam Cronkright writes:

This is Adam Cronkright, cofounder of Democracy In Practice, an organization that has been experimenting with random selection of representatives in student governments in Bolivia for the past two years. Independently from Democracy In Practice, I’m putting out a call for contributors and readers of Equality by Lot to participate in and help beta test a new online platform that randomly distributes decision-making/moderating power and responsibility among its users.

I’ve been doing some beta testing for a website called Postwaves. The site is inspired by the Wisdom of Crowds (popularized by James Surowiechi) and uses sortition to share moderator responsibilities evenly among all the members of a forum. That is, each post gets randomly and anonymously sent out to a small portion of forum users who vote independently and anonymously on whether the post is relevant to the large group (NOT on whether or not they agree with the post). If it receives a certain threshold (say 50% of those randomly asked to assess it find that it is relevant) it get’s made public on the forum. So in essence, they are testing a sortition-based, scalable way for online groups to moderate themselves horizontally. The idea is to more effectively filter out noise (i.e. irrelevant content) and allow the best content to be most visible regardless of who posted it (celebrity vs. normal person) or whether the first person(s) that read it gave it a thumbs up or a thumbs down (which can have a disproportionate effect on the opinions of those that follow).
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Filed under: Action, Applications, Sortition | 4 Comments »

David Grant’s play about sortition to be read in St. Louis

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Yoram Gat

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reports:

Global movement towards representative legislatures

St. Louis, Missouri, 18 October: A world-wide movement towards establishing legislative bodies that are fully representative finds expression in the staged reading of “Our Common Lot” by David Grant. The short play is written for an international conference, “Democracy for the 21st Century,” to be held in December at the Library of Alexandria, Egypt.

In the play, Marisa, Alma, Sami, and Ali live in a city embroiled in conflict and violence — the Regime, the Opposition, the Opposition to the Opposition. When the fighting stops, they ask themselves: What is the best way to move forward? “Our Common Lot” argues for choosing legislators in the way that the first democracy did – by random lot, known as ‘sortition.’

In the original Athenian democracy, sortition was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. Most recently the city of Melbourne, Australia has used a random sample of citizens to determine its ten-year financial plan. Two-thirds of the recent Irish Constitutional Convention was composed of sortitionally-chosen citizens.

The reading of “Our Common Lot” is its world premiere. The ensemble includes Adam Flores, Carl Overly, Jr., Erin Roberts, and Jacqueline Thompson.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Books, Fiction, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Technology is not the missing ingredient for democracy

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Yoram Gat

An email I sent to the editors of The New Scientist:

To: “letters@newscientist.com”
Subject: Technology is not the missing ingredient for democracy

Dear Editors,

As you write (“A vote for change“, 25 April, 2015), people perceive that “the parties are all the same, the politicians are all the same, they are not like us”. This perception reflects the inherent elitist nature of the electoral process. Within the electoral process people and parties compete for power. Those who manage to win form a select group with those distinct characteristics that allowed them to win: better connections, more wealth, better organizational skills, more ambition, etc. Why would we expect those winners to represent the rest of us?

Since non-representativity is inherent to the electoral process, technology cannot change its nature. Technology may shift power within the system. Those groups that find out how to exploit new technology may be able to gain power at the expense of others who fail to do so. However, the elitist nature of elections will persist. Those new to power will again be a distinctive group with their own particular agenda and interests and will not represent the public at large.

Achieving a democratic system will require a radical change: moving away from our reliance on elections for selection people with power. Representative power can be created by relying on an established scientific method for obtaining representativity: random sampling. When parliament is selected as a random sample of the population then it would truly be “like us” and then it can then be expected to create policy that promotes the interests of the average citizen.

Best regards,

Yoram Gat

Filed under: Action, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »