Has anyone seen this yet? It appears to be about a week old and be tied to an online petition.
Anyone familiar with Scottish politics, please share your thoughts.
Filed under: Action, Initiatives, Press, Sortition | Tagged: petition, Scotland, sortition | 4 Comments »
Iain Walker of newDemocracy collected some TV reports about the citizens jury on alcohol related violence in South Australia:
ABC:
Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »
news.com.au reports:
A “CITIZENS’ jury” will deliberate on Adelaide’s future and deliver their verdict to the State Government.
Forty randomly selected South Australians will consider how to make the city both vibrant and safe and their recommendations will go to Parliament.
Premier Jay Weatherill will outsource this latest incarnation of “debate and decide” to a not-for-profit organisation, the newDemocracy Foundation. It boasts the support of a range of luminaries and former politicians and is dedicated to finding a “better system” of government.
It will invite about 20,000 randomly selected people to apply, then use an algorithm to find 40 people who are broadly representative of the community.
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Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | 13 Comments »
A review of David Graeber‘s book, The Democracy Project, in The Nation makes a brief mention of his offer of sortition. The Nation‘s verdict: “That sounds nice, but it’s far easier said than done.”
For many who were attracted by slogans like “banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” the fetishization of process seemed like bait and switch. Horizontal decision making at general assemblies and small groups could go on for hours. Far from being democratic, the time-consuming process discriminated against people with jobs, those who had to take care of children or sick people, those with health problems of their own and those unfamiliar with anarchist culture and jargon, among others. Just as is the case with liberal structures, horizontalism encourages democracy in some contexts and dampens it in others.
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Filed under: Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »
“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 »
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:
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.
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Filed under: Action, Athens, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 11 Comments »
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 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).
Filed under: History, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »
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”
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 »
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
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avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
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Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
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graytmatter
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HpR
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Equality by lot 