Asset or approval voting =?= sortitional selection

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

As a result of my video entries to the Looking at Democracy contest, the following message came to my Common Lot website:

I’ve been a proponent of legislative juries for some time. We also promote advanced proportional representation systems.
ScoreVoting.net/Asset.html
ScoreVoting.net/RRV.html

Here was our Looking At Democracy contest entry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db6Syys2fmE

… I’d like to devote the rest of my life to democracy reform. The legislative jury idea is one I’m quite fond of. Feel free to join our discussion forum and share your thoughts. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/electionscience

Best,
Clay Shentrup
The Center for Election Science

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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Sortition | 32 Comments »

David Halevy: What is true democracy?

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Yoram Gat

David Halevy, a resident of British Columbia, Canada, advocates for replacing elections with sortition in a series of three videos:

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Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »

Sortition noted by far-right group

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/sortition/

Although electoral representation is a discredited system, White Nationalists should not give up on the idea or virtues of democratic representation but should seek alternative ways of achieving this through sortition — the selection of representatives through a randomized process like a national lottery.

The political potential of sortition is virtually unknown in White Nationalist circles. Edgar Steele mentioned it briefly in his book Defensive Racism arguing that juries, which are selected by sortition, should not only decide questions of fact, i.e. whether the accused has broken the law, but also importantly that they also be allowed to rule on the legitimacy of the law in question.[1] This essay goes far beyond Steele’s proposals and argues that sortition should play a decisive role in the political process itself, so much so that bad laws never see the light of day and are killed in their drafting stage.

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Citizens Jury on alcohol related violence in South Australia

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Yoram Gat

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 »

Louis offers sortition to the Belgian parliament

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Yoram Gat

A commenter draws attention to a recent speech by Belgian MP Laurent Louis:

According to the description on the YouTube page, Louis is presenting a proposal based on the ideas of Etienne Chouard which is laid out in detail here: http://www.lachambre.be/FLWB/PDF/53/2860/53K2860001.pdf.

An automatic translation of the introduction of the proposal (with my touch-ups) is as follows:

A motion for a resolution on the revision of the electoral system and the establishment of the draw members of the Federal Parliament of the Kingdom of Belgium

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Introduction

The Kingdom of Belgium has gone through its history, a plurality of policies by landscapes from the bipartisan confrontation (1830-1893) to extreme multiparty (1965-present), all with a common point, the election. Belgium claims, like all Western countries which have adopted the same system, to be a representative democracy. Representative democracy is a “system in which elected representatives by the people develop and pass legislation.” This system, highly controversial for many years, does not give the people the opportunity to express itself and to pass laws (as in a direct democracy), but has “the great disadvantage of vesting the decision making power, not in the people themselves as the idea of ​​democracy suggests, but in representatives elected by the people and governments designated indirectly, not to mention even more indirect selection of public agencies and other institutions.”
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Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Nicholas Gruen: Establish special-purpose ‘democratic’ elites

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics, Chairman of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, an entrepreneur involved in a number of internet startups, wants to use sortition to “cut through the weaknesses of ‘vox pop democracy'”:

It turns out that it’s in the opposition’s interest to oppose government policy even where most informed people think the government is right, perhaps even where most of the people think it’s right. Whereupon the process of undermining community sentiment begins apace. On abstract and complex subjects, lots of effort can be expended emphasising uncertainties, nursing resentments, breaking the law to obtain emails and then using them to smear scientists’ motivations etc. Who cares that careful investigation showed that these emails didn’t illustrate what they were taken to illustrate? By then the caravan has moved on.

Other areas where there’s been strong consensus based around expert opinion which have then been exploited by oppositions include tax reform of virtually every hue from the mining tax to CGT, FBT and GST reform.
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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Sortition | 10 Comments »

Sortition in The Nation, fleetingly

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Yoram Gat

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 »

Poletecracy

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Post by Jon Roland.

A political or management system can be characterized by the kind of people it elevates to positions of authority. A number of terms have been proposed by cynics, such as plutocracy, rule by the rich, kleptocracy, rule by thieves, or kakistocracy, rule by the worst. But from this writer’s experience with the most influential legislators, bureaucrats, judges, and corporate executives, the finding is that what attribute is most important to the success of most of them is the ability to sell and make connections with other people. In Greek a salesman is a πωλητής, or poletes. This suggests a word, poletecracy.

In a few cases technical skills help enable someone to rise to power, but most people in high positions are not experts in anything but campaigning and dealmaking. Most are politicians (πολιτικοί) first and foremost. If they acquire any expertise, it is usually after being on a job for a while, not while they are climbing. Their personal assets are favors earned and paid, and being able to have other influential people take their phone calls.
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Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 7 Comments »

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.
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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 »

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