A notable example [of cleromancy] in the New Testament occurs in the Acts of the Apostles 1:23-26 where the eleven remaining apostles cast lots to determine whether to select Matthias, or Barsabbas (surnamed Justus) to replace Judas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy
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Phil Wilson, a retired mental health worker, makes a pretty good, as well as entertaining, case for sortition on Resilience.org. Some excerpts are below, but the entire piece is pretty well written.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Can Sortition Save Us From the Zombies of Extinction?
If, like me, you live in the brain consuming fog of American culture, you might never have heard of sortition. Randomly selected citizens rather than ruling class proxies will make the important decisions in a future society that chooses to employ sortition as its fundamental political philosophy.
We need sortition to replace the poisonous, deformed contraption that we bizarrely call democracy. Let me try to explain.
Any available elective office summons demons, fiends and gargoyles from the burning sewage pits of hell – things with eyes pulsating, greedy and murderous. We want to keep these monsters calmly interred beneath the soil, and that can only occur if voting is treated like small pox.
Look at the wreckage surrounding us. We voted for it.
Most people who seek power in any political system are mentally deformed and broken – these are the people we try not to marry or even sit near at the pub, but we elect them with barely a thought.
We can’t have anarchy – we need a way to gather benign bureaucrats and harmless functionaries. We have seats in congress, seats in the senate, chairpersons and committee seats, and there has to be a method, other than voting for batshit, flaming, spirits of death – chosen by corporate goons. We need to simply match chairs with rumps. Give us body snatchers – blind ones with big nets.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »
A few days ago, the Portland Press Herald published a bold, “completely original” plan for city government, about which “political philosophers will be writing for millennia”. Sortition is an important part of this plan.
First, competitive elections will be abolished. No more “vote for me.” No more sloganeering. No more name recognition. Instead of popularity contests, members of every representative office in our city will be elected by sortition, or through a lottery system, with officials chosen at random for a term of one year. We will have 66 districts, each containing roughly 1,000 people. This will make our city a true government of the people. The mechanics of election-by-sortition are simple: An algorithm will randomly select a name from the city’s draft rolls.
Next, we are proposing a tricameral system of government: a 66-person Popular Assembly of Legislative Supremacy (“PALS”), a House of Landlords and Yeomanry (“HOLY”) and a three-person Supreme High-most Unlimited Council of Knowledge Systems (“SHUCKS Troika”). Our nine-person City Council will be gone. So will be our city manager. All three new branches have key roles, but the PALS shall be our chief lawmaking and deliberative body.
Sortition shall select the members of the 66-person PALS branch. The idea is simple: It could be you. PALS will be a raucous parliament made up of average citizens, all chosen at random.
Filed under: Elections, Fiction, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »
Gillian Dymond writes in The Conservative Woman:
AN article in the online publication Civil Service World last February announced that former civil servant Sue Gray is working with Labour on plans to introduce citizens’ assemblies should the party, as is likely, win the next election. These assemblies are very much in vogue, with recent examples having allegedly helped secure ‘yes’ votes for abortion and gay marriage in the Irish Republic. The less enthusiastic amongst us, however, might conclude that they are just another charade to be played out within the parameters of permitted debate, with a view to ensuring, in the words of Nick Cohen back in 1999, that ‘the public can only want what the public gets’.
Choice of subject matter is only one of the many ways in which citizens’ assemblies may be subverted and controlled.
How, for instance, are the questions put to participants chosen, and what are the implications of the wording in which they are framed?
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Walter Lippmann wrote a haunting paragraph, which I’ll paraphrase thusly: Man’s problems are complex. Man’s capacity is limited. So how is Man to master his problems? That is the conundrum of the age.
The answer (obviously—or not so obviously) is to cut Man’s problems down to manageable sizes and designate task groups to deal with each. Divide and conquer, in other words.
In governance, this cutting down implies topical specialization of the governing entity. In other words, it implies many (say two dozen) topic-focused mini-, or Demi-, legislatures at the state and national levels, corresponding to the existing congressional committees at those levels. For example, there would be a Demi-legislature for topics such as health, education, welfare, commerce, labor, transportation, communication, the environment, justice, the interior, etc. Specialized Proxy Electorates would oversee each specialized Demi Legislator.
This topic-specialized, semi-elected, long-serving, small-sized arrangement is not open to the criticisms below of a “citizens jury,” (which many sortition fans endorse), which is unspecialized, randomly selected, new-to-the-job (inexperienced), and blob-sized.
… the differences between a jury system and government by lottery are profound. A jury consists of only 12 people. These 12 are chosen rather carefully…. The questions they must decide are rather limited —generally only a single question of right or wrong in a specific instance, and within the framework of a well articulated, body of law and precedent—and in this decision they are guided by a judge, who explains carefully what they can and cannot consider…. This is qualitatively different from throwing hundreds of people randomly chosen into a room, with huge numbers of issues …. —Malcolm Margolin, quoted in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 77-78.
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I posted this on my own Substack at the time of John Burnheim’s memorial — in Nov 2023 and, coming across it looking for something else, it occurred to me that the folks on this blog might be interested in it.
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This post is a transcript of a discussion that has been going on in email over the last few days. I suggested that we continue this on Equality-by-Lot so more people can respond if interested, and so that a public record is produced which can later be referred to. All are invited to continue the discussion in the comments thread.
The discussion was part of a longer thread, but the transcript starts with the following message from Chris Forman:
I’m leaning to the premise that it’s the sum of the daily interactions between people that adds up to the behavior of society writ large. The purpose of lotteries and deliberation is to build connectivity and relationships from which good policy flows.
A simple plan to transform US society is to hold social events with a lottery element in them. I think simply connecting random people in local communities and supporting those connection meetups with well structured events and follow up activities could be a recipe that many many civic organizations could get behind.
Could be a really useful tool for organizations trying to reach broader demographics while training people in the value of lotteries, and building up support for lotteries through direct experiences.
Could transform society.
I replied:
Meeting with random people could be fun (although it could also be tedious). But the notion that mass participation is by itself a path to democracy is unconvincing. It ignores the fact that governance takes structure. Our current non-democratic government is based on structure, and democratic government would also require structure.
Filed under: Deliberation, Participation, Sortition | 134 Comments »
Experiments in oversight-only IVEs (i.e., IVEs that don’t elect legislators) of governmental bodies could start small, at the local level, and work upward, to the county, state, and national levels, if justified by prior success.
Then the power of electing a portion of the legislators under their supervision could be phased in, as experience warrants, and as voters approve, and IVEs would become PEs (Proxy Electorates).
Voters might be glad to delegate the election of certain low-level officeholders, like dogcatchers, sewer commissioners, and comptrollers to Proxy Electorates. Voters know little of their qualifications and characters—and don’t want to know. Let George Do It is their unspoken attitude.
New PE members would be given a crash course on their assigned topic, and on the rules and customs of being a Proxy Elector.
PEs would gather, usually online, at regular intervals (more frequently at high levels) to hear their officeholders—and their critics—speak, and to interrogate them. They would not gather only at election time.
In the intervals between these gatherings, Proxies would have a private cyberspace forum and a Zoom site in which they could converse among themselves about what had occurred at those gatherings.
A Secretariat’s personnel would preside at meetings, take minutes, schedule speakers, maintain a library, do background checks on candidates, provide orientation sessions for newcomers, etc.
Training would include inside-look “documentaries” of the deliberations of good-outcome PEs of the past, to serve as models for how to behave. There should also be documentaries about bad-outcome PEs, as object-lessons in what not to do.
The control of important political knowledge by leaders constitutes, of course, a very basic element in perpetuating power politics. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 46.
Filed under: Books, Elections, Proposals | 8 Comments »
A referendum in Ireland on March 8 resulted in a “no” vote for constitutional changes. The rejected proposals were the product of a process involving an allotted citizen assembly. An article by Rory Carroll in the The Guardian offers an illuminating review of the aftermath of the failure of the proposed changes at the polls.
Irish referendum fiasco puts future of lauded citizens’ assemblies in doubt
Debates involving 99 randomly selected people were hailed as a model for the world, but some say faith has been eroded
When Ireland shattered its history of social conservatism by passing a 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage and a 2018 referendum on abortion, progressives credited its citizens’ assembly.
Ninety-nine randomly selected people, who are brought together to debate a specific issue, had weighed evidence from experts and issued policy recommendations that emboldened the political establishment, and voters, to make audacious leaps.
Governments and campaigners around the world hailed Ireland as a model for how to tackle divisive issues and a modern incarnation of the concept of deliberative democracy that dated back to ancient Athens.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 21 Comments »
Presented by Wayne Liebman, M.D., American activist, advocate, and strategist for democratic lotteries and deliberation based in California.
Our deliberative ecosystem has a linguistic blind spot. In thinking about lottery based democracy, we often leave strategy off the table. It’s actually the conversation that we should always be having: ABC–Always Be Calculating. What strategy to use depends on the goal, but whatever your goal, thinking strategically will ease the way.
Or dial: (DK) +45 70 71 41 04 PIN: 464 474 557# — More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/bct-xucx-gep?pin=1550818843600
Filed under: meeting, Organizing, Sortition | Leave a comment »
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