“Tennessee’s GOP Governor Rejects Medicaid Expansion, Leaves Residents To ‘Health Care Lottery’”

Posted on June 7, 2013 by peterstone

“Tennessee’s GOP Governor Rejects Medicaid Expansion, Leaves Residents To ‘Health Care Lottery’”

Gov. Bill Haslam (R-TN) announced on Wednesday that he will not pursue Obamacare’s optional expansion of the Medicaid program, which would extend health coverage to an additional 140,000 uninsured Tennesseans […].

[…]

Since there are a significant number of low-income Tennessee residents whose annual incomes put them above the cut-off for TennCare coverage, but whose expensive medical bills make them unable to afford to purchase private insurance on their own, the state holds a “health care lottery” twice a year to allow those residents to call in for a special application for TennCare. The phone lines are flooded, and many people are unable to get through. Many of those people would be eligible to gain public health insurance coverage under the Medicaid expansion, and would no longer have to desperately dial a state number in the hopes of winning an elusive lottery to access the care they need.

Not the most edifying use of a lottery–a bit like cannibalizing someone by lottery because you’re feeling too lazy to go to the supermarket.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | Tagged: Health Care, Lotteries, Tennessee | Leave a comment »

Spectator call for nomothetai to decide Britain’s membership of the EU

Posted on May 30, 2013 by keithsutherland

Sir: Peter Jones (25 May) is right to draw an unfavourable comparison between ancient and modern democracy, but he is focusing on the wrong institution. The Athenian council was merely the secretariat for the general assembly, and the legislation passed by the assembly was often as erratic as modern referenda. After the restoration of democracy in 403 bc, legislation was entrusted to nomothetai — large randomly selected juries that, unlike modern parliamentarians, were obliged to listen to the arguments of well-informed advocates for and against the proposed law before deciding the outcome by secret vote

If David Cameron wants the people do decide. . .

read on: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/letters/8921081/letters-285/

This proposal, written in response to André Sauzeau’s proposal for minimal reforms, was submitted as an article (see below) and originally accepted for publication by the Spectator, but ended up cut down into a short letter. The Spectator website has a comments section, so suggest we use that as an opportunity to kick-start the conversation on sortition there, rather than commenting on this forum.

Full article:

Put the EU on Trial

By Keith Sutherland

The answer to Britain’s EU problem is not a public referendum, it’s an adversarial judicial inquiry in front of a large citizen jury, selected by lot

The success of UKIP in the recent elections has led to unprecedented soul searching within the political class in general and the Conservative Party in particular, with no fewer than three former cabinet ministers arguing that Britain should leave the EU. David Cameron has committed the party to a referendum on EU membership, but the public often just use referenda as an excuse to put two fingers up to the government. There is an urgent need to find a more reliable mechanism to allow the people to make a well-informed decision on what is arguably the most important issue in contemporary politics.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Athens, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »

David Graeber: “The democratic way of choosing officials, if you had to do it, was lottery.”

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Yoram Gat

David Graeber is an

American anthropologist, political activist and author. He is currently reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and was formerly an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. David is a member of the labour union Industrial Workers of the World, and has played a role in events such as the 2002 New York protests against the World Economic Forum. His most recent book is Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)

He is also described as

a man of many talents. A longtime activist, a professor of anthropology at the University of London, and a prolific author, David also helped found the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. He even coined the phrase “We are the 99%.”

Graeber is not impressed with the electoral system:
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Filed under: Academia, History, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Sebastián Linares: El sorteo de cargos públicos: un método para mejorar la democracia

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Sebastián Linares writes in Con Distintos Acentos (Google Translate with my touch-ups):

Lottery for public office: a method to improve democracy

The concept of democracy has been associated, in different historical periods, with two very different methods for selection of public officials and accountability: the popular election of representatives and sortition (drawing names at random). In the last two hundred years democratic theory has assumed that the only democratic method to choose public officials is the election of representatives by popular vote. However, from its origins in Athens (435 BC) until well into the nineteenth century, the concept of “democracy” used to refer to the use of sortition for the selection of public officials (Manin 1997).

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Filed under: History, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Diversity Lottery

Posted on May 16, 2013 by peterstone

It appears that the U.S. Diversity Lottery may be in trouble. Thoughts?

A segment on today’s Take Two featured an interview with a immigration policy expert on the Diversity Visa Lottery, a quirky program based partly on random selection that rewards applicants from countries that are under-represented among the nation’s immigrant diasporas. The Senate immigration reform bill proposes doing away with the program.

If the diversity visa sounds familiar, that’s because a related fiasco made headlines two years ago: In the spring of 2011, thousands of applicants were mistakenly informed they’d won an immigrant visa by the U.S. government, and then — whoops! — told there had been a computer glitch and that the good news was a mistake.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | Tagged: Diversity Lottery, Immigration | 1 Comment »

“They Can Do It All on a Computer”

Posted on May 2, 2013 by peterstone

“They Can Do It All on a Computer”

Google Alerts directed me to this brief article. Not particularly exciting, but I wonder what people think of the idea of random selection taking place entirely on a computer like this. Happens quite a lot, I gather–I think that’s how the Dutch medical school lottery is done. But it’s rather hard to verify that a lottery is fair when it’s just a guy typing commands into a computer in the comfort of his office. Thoughts? Does this matter?

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Juries, Press, Sortition | Tagged: Juries, random selection, Randomness | 28 Comments »

Write a note to George Monbiot

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Update: Monbiot responded as follows:

Interesting: many thanks for this Yoram. G

George Monbiot is frustrated with government:

Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government’s full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.

He asks:

So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority?

He is looking for inspiring, transfiguring ideas that will show a way out of this predicament. Please join me and write a note to Monbiot to offer sortition as such a crucial idea.

Here is what I wrote:

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Filed under: Action, Press, Sortition | 11 Comments »

How to insure sortition would be attractive to most?

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

These two articles about the salaries, or lack thereof, offered to state legislators make me wonder about two aspects of any prospective sortitioned legislature.

The first is the question of how to attract and sustain participation, particularly regarding financial support.

The second, consequentially, is whether or not citizens should be required to actively submit their names to the pool for sortition. [“Not required” would be, then, as juries are chosen. “Required” would require registration…and possibly, further, a basic competence test — a la driver’s licences.]

Granted, both topics have been previously discussed in this blog. But I recall there is no agreement about either.

http://www.alamogordonews.com/opinion/ci_22656513/n-m-s-citizen-legislature-is-an-oxymoron

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/feb/27/where-do-nevadas-legislators-rank-nationally-salar/

Filed under: Press, Sortition | 4 Comments »

“Absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding”

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Yoram Gat

A British judge was very unhappy with the jury in a high-profile trial last week:

Vicky Pryce, the ex-wife of the disgraced cabinet minister Chris Huhne, faces a retrial next week over taking speeding points for him because a jury failed to reach a verdict, after suffering what the judge described as “absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding”.

The Guardian seemed to concur:

Mr Justice Sweeney discharged the panel of eight women and four men following more than 15 hours of deliberations, and a day after they submitted 10 questions that indicated they had not grasped the basics of their task,

but assembled a set of professionals defending the jury institution:
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Juries, Press | 12 Comments »

A Belgian MP calling for sortition

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Louis Laurent, a Belgian MP, is calling for the use of sortition in order to achieve “true representation” (machine translation with my touch-ups):

Louis Laurent demands the dissolution of “all political parties” responsible, according to him, for the current poor governance, corruption and cronyism at all levels of government.

Laurent demands the creation of a “citizen” parliament assembled by sortition, in order to guarantee true representation.