Equality by lot

Clay Shentrup wrote to announce the Election by Jury website he created.

If you were accused of a crime, who would you want deciding your fate?

• A panel of randomly selected jurors, all of whom have spent multiple weeks sitting in a courtroom, listening to all the relevant facts and arguments put forward by both sides
• A popular vote open to hundreds of thousands of people in your county, the vast majority of whom only know a few sound bites about the case, which they heard from a biased and one-sided source

The premise behind “Election by Jury” is simple: we believe that our government, just like the criminal justice system, will function better if our representatives are elected after weeks of deliberation by a panel of randomly selected jurors. These jurors would hear from the candidates and their expert-witnesses, deliberate among themselves, and cast their votes in secret.

Here are a few of the most compelling benefits of our proposal:

1. An “electorate” that is better informed
2. Better ways of combating misinformation
3. Breaking away from echo-chambers

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 10 Comments »

My prescription is to “de-mass-ify” democracy by downsizing and dividing the electorate into multiple, issue-specific “Demi” (small) electorates, each responsible for a single electee. At a stroke the power of the Pernicious P’s would be cut by some 80%.

The representatives must be raised to a certain number in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and … must be limited to a certain number in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude. —The Federalist #10.

Such Demi-electorates would continuously oversee and supervise their single officeholder throughout his/her term, not just during an election campaign.

These Proxy Electorates (PEs) would meet for hours every few months, primarily over a private intranet. Each PE would hear a report from its officeholder (who would have a correspondingly limited, issue-specific scope), pose questions, hear criticisms, discuss matters among themselves, and optionally make recommendations, authorize research, and launch investigations. During intervals individual electors could add comments, do research, chat, message, query the webmaster, etc.

In other words, these PEs would not be solely electors—they would be, at the least, actively involved overseers, and at most semi-legislatures, with their electee being only a functionary, depending on their charter and their mood.

Proxy Electors would be chosen as follows. Each member of the “full” (or “base,” or “mass”) electorate would be given 10 (say) “ballots” with which he/she could nominate similar everyday citizens to be his/her Proxies; no more than three ballots could be cast for any one person, including for him/herself.

All nominations would go into a virtual “bal-lottery box,” along, optionally, with some percentage of randomly selected names—say from 20% to 50%. From the box the names of pending Proxy Electors would be drawn and put into a reserve pool.

This technique is a combination, respectively, of selection (by nomination) and sortition (the technical term for random selection in politics).

There would be four (say) tiers, or levels, of Proxy Electorates: Local, County, State, and National. Bal-lotteries would be used to promote Electors from one tier to the next-higher tier, while remaining as much as possible within a similar issue-specialty (or “topical domain”) —e.g., education, law enforcement, transportation, commerce, etc. These successive bal-lotteries would tend to sift out the invincibly ignorant, improving the quality of the remaining Proxy Electors, especially at the upper levels, where noxious numbskulls would be the most damaging.

A dozen or so single-topic legislators would make up a “Demi” (i.e., small), single-topic legislature. Twelve to thirty Demi legislatures would in turn make up a full, Omni-topic legislature, whose approval would be needed before bills passed by its Demi components became law. Its members would be elected by either Demi-legislators, or Proxy Electorates, or some combination of both.

Proxy Electors would in addition freely nominate their favorite fellow electors for promotion to the electorate at the next level up (town, county, state, nation), using the random selection method already described, which I’ve dubbed a “bal-lottery.”

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »