Equality by lot

A little more than a year ago, Adam Grant offered sortition to the readers of The New York Times. Now Daniel Pink offers it to the readers of the The Washington Post. Interestingly, and encouragingly in terms of the foothold that the idea of sortition may now have gained, Pink writes that he is merely echoing proposals made by readers whose ideas for “improving our country, our organizations or our lives” were solicited by the Post.

On Election Day, we affirm with our actions an unspoken principle of governance: The fairest and most democratic way to determine who wields public power is by asking citizens to cast ballots.

But what if there’s an alternative — not autocracy or monarchy but a more radical form of democratic representation and popular sovereignty?

“Why not make serving in Congress like jury duty?” asks a reader in Salt Lake City. “If you meet the criteria, you could be selected to serve for a term, which would give a broader cross-section of people representing regular Americans.”

The article is typical in the sense that instead of engaging with arguments previously made it merely repeats such previous arguments, even when these were addressed and refuted. (And even if they are transparently self-contradictory.)

It’s a bit nutty — complicated and replete with unintended consequences. But first, let’s examine its virtues.
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Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist and fairly prominent YouTube figure with over 1.5 million followers. Her clips are about the physical sciences, but she occasionally strays outside this area. Her most recent video is titled “Is the USA a Democracy or a Republic?”. The analysis she offers is not too perceptive in my mind, but it does have the advantage of mentioning the idea of selecting political decision making bodies using a lottery. This idea gets a brief teaser in the introduction and a bit more detail toward the end of the video.

Naturally, most of the thousands of comments to the video focus on the democracy vs. republic matter, but at least one comment does pick up on the sortition idea:

Problem with representative democracy is that strangers, who do not know you, cannot represent you. The premise is simply false.

Voting is entering a contract, asking to be ruled by a handful of strangers. Extending them Power Of Attorney, four years into the future … If you sign that, whatever happens, you have no right to complain, because you accepted the deal.

Here is what we should do instead : Government by lottery

1000 citizens randomly selected. 200 replacements selected every year, giving five years in government for each. Then perhaps a quarterly online voting session for the rest of us; Yes/No to the bill with slimmest decisive vote, in the 1000-man parlament during that quarter.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »