Neutralizing Self-Selection Bias in Sampling for Sortition

Posted on December 23, 2021 by keithsutherland

Bailey Flanigan, Paul Gölz, Anupam Gupta, and Ariel Procaccia, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10498

Yoram recently drew our attention to this sortition paper which was highly ranked by the Google search engine. It’s interesting to see that engineers and computer scientists take the problem of self-selection bias more seriously than political theorists and sortition activists.

Abstract: Sortition is a political system in which decisions are made by panels of randomly selected citizens. The process for selecting a sortition panel is traditionally thought of as uniform sampling without replacement, which has strong fairness properties. In practice, however, sampling without replacement is not possible since only a fraction of agents is willing to participate in a panel when invited, and different demographic groups participate at different rates. In order to still produce panels whose composition resembles that of the population, we develop a sampling algorithm that restores close-to-equal representation probabilities for all agents while satisfying meaningful demographic quotas. As part of its input, our algorithm requires probabilities indicating how likely each volunteer in the pool was to participate. Since these participation probabilities are not directly observable, we show how to learn them, and demonstrate our approach using data on a real sortition panel combined with information on the general population in the form of publicly available survey data.

Citing statistics from the Sortition Foundation:

typically, only between 2 and 5% of citizens are willing to participate in the panel when contacted. Moreover, those who do participate exhibit self-selection bias, i.e., they are not representative of the population, but rather skew toward certain groups with certain features.

To address these issues, sortition practitioners introduce additional steps into the sampling process.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

2021 review – statistics

Posted on December 21, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 12th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2021 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 2,684 13 182
Feb 3,105 15 117
Mar 3,253 11 131
Apr 3,096 9 118
May 3,303 14 34
June 2,806 11 70
July 2,408 7 76
Aug 2,506 6 41
Sept 2,314 11 93
Oct 2,400 8 102
Nov 2,388 10 136
Dec (to 21st) 2,133 10 92
Total 32,396 125 1,192

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the wordpress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 20 authors during 2021. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

This blog currently has 152 email followers, 334 WordPress followers and 499 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian).

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 2nd result (out of “about 330,000 results”). Continuing the demotion trend which has begun last year, Equality-by-Lot is now on the 10th page of results when searching for “sortition” using the Google search engine (out of “about 285,000 results”). This demotion may explain the significant decline in the total number of views in 2021 relative to 2020.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Huffman: The jury is a political, as well as a judicial, institution

Posted on December 21, 2021 by Yoram Gat

James L. Huffman, professor of law and the former dean of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, OR, writes in The Hill.

Second-guessing jury verdicts undermines confidence in the democratic system

English jurist William Blackstone observed before the founding of the American nation, the jury serves as a popular check on abuses by those who wield the powers of the state: “[The jury] preserves in the hands of the people that share which they ought to have in the administration of public justice and prevents the encroachments of the more powerful and wealthy citizens.”

The jury is thus a political, as well as a judicial, institution — but that does not mean juries engage in politics or should be subjected to political influence and judgment. In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the jury can be either a democratic or an aristocratic institution “that places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed or in a portion of them, and not in those who govern.”

Because juries in America are drawn by lot from the general population, they are democratic but insulated from the bias of public officials and the partisan preferences of shifting majorities.

As the American Bar Association states in a publication on the history of the jury system: “[T]he right to a jury of one’s peers is a corner-stone of American democracy. Along with voting, it’s one of the main ways people take part in the public life of this nation.”

Routine questioning of the legitimacy of duly reached jury verdicts is no less an attack on democracy than is questioning the legitimacy of a duly conducted election. The jury exists to resolve disputes over individual rights and government power, not to serve a partisan agenda. In resolving the dispute in a particular case, the jury functions not as an instrument of the ruling party but rather as a check on the politicization of the administration of justice.

Filed under: Juries, Press | Leave a comment »

Guides and standards of good practice for allotted assemblies in politics

Posted on December 20, 2021 by paulnollen

As the use of allotted assemblies (also called juries, or similar terms) in politics grows by the year, so does the number of guides and standards of good practice for those bodies. It seems therefore necessary to provide an evaluation tool for this kind of publication.

In this post I list relevant publications. Future posts will be devoted to the development of the evaluation tool. No doubt this will be a challenge. Then we will be able to evaluate the each of the publications in subsequent posts.

  1. The Alliance for a Diverse Democracy, Dr. Antoine Vergne: Citizens’ Participation Using Sortition: A practical guide to using random selection to guarantee diverse democratic participation.
  2. newDemocracy and the UN Democracy Fund: Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections.
  3. ‘meer democratie’ (Belgium), Paul Nollen: Code of Good Practice for allotted mini-publics involved with legislation.
  4. Sortition Foundation: How to run a citizens’ assembly.
  5. Marcin Gerwin: Citizens Assemblies: Guide to democracy that works.
  6. Extinction Rebellion: The Extinction Rebellion Guide to Citizens Assemblies.
  7. Innovation in Democracy Programme (UK): How to run a
    citizens’ assembly    : A handbook for local authorities based on the Innovation in Democracy Programme.
  8. Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and The newDemocracy Foundation: An introduction to deliberative democracy for members of parliament.
  9. OECD: Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions.
  10. Sciences Citoyennes: La convention de citoyens (French), The Citizens Convention (English).

Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Sortition in 2021

Posted on December 18, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post.

The most significant piece of sortition-related news of the year was, in my view, the findings of an opinion poll run in four Western European countries – the UK, France, Italy and Germany – regarding the place of sortition in government. The survey found that 27%-30% among those asked support using allotted bodies to systematically complement the work of parliament.

As always, sortition has been most prominent in 2021 in the Francophone world. Early in the year, Macron’s administration in France formed an allotted panel monitoring the Coronavirus vaccination campaign. Not much has been heard of it since. The utilization of allotment by the Macron administration has become frequent enough to merit condemnation as well as ridicule. Sortition’s political presence is such that it draws regular criticism from elite writers, but also some support. The journal Raisons politiques devoted a large part of an issue to sortition. In Switzerland, a proposal to select judges by lot among qualified candidates failed at the polls.

However, sortition had some presence elsewhere as well in 2021. An allotted assembly was convened as part of the COP26 UN climate change conference. In Bosnia and Herzegovina a citizen assembly was called to express its opinion on constitutional and electoral questions. Scotland’s Citizen Assembly published its report. One of the recommendations in the report was to use allotted bodies to scrutinize government proposals and parliamentary bills. An allotted assembly about the climate was discussed in Austria as well. Ireland held a citizens’ assembly on gender equality. Washington state allotted a climate assembly. In the wake of the protests following the murder of George Floyd, allotted police oversight commissions were discussed in California. A CS course at Harvard dealt with sortition and an algorithm for quota sampling from unrepresentative volunteers made it into Nature.

The Japanese journal Law and Philosophy devoted an issue to “Just Lotteries”. Hélène Landemore, Yale political science professor and author of the book Open Democracy, has promoted sortition in an interview in The Nation magazine and in an article in Foreign Policy magazine. The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College held a conference about sortition.

Sortition was proposed as a way to create a governing body for the Internet, as tool to counter the allure of the Chinese system, as a way to save the UK and to stop popular but “undemocratic or illiberal” leaders from getting elected, and as a way to appoint public servants. A paper discussed sortition with a focus on India. In Massachusetts a letter to the newspaper introduced its readers to the idea of allotted citizen assemblies. A new book asserted that sortition is the only way to achieve a demcoratic system, while an article claimed that sortition is unable to address the biggest problem of the existing system, citizen apathy.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Opinion polling, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Sortition: An Ancient Remedy to Heal the Organized Community’s Wounds

Posted on December 12, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Christopher Tripoulas writes in The National Herald, a publication aimed at the Greek American community:

For months now, the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York has been embroiled in an ugly dispute between rival sides. As the coordinating umbrella organization for local Greek societies, its primary function is to organize the annual Greek Independence Day Parade on Fifth Avenue.

Despite any criticism regarding its subdued presence in other issues of vital importance for the Greek-American Community or the manner in which it organizes the parade, the truth is that with the exception of Holy Week, it handles perhaps the largest and most recognizable collective Greek Community activity in America. This alone constitutes the resolution of the present dysfunctionality an immediate priority.

The organization of a parade, without clear objectives and messages, negates its very purpose. Although the parade takes place in a prime location and is covered live by a large metropolitan area broadcaster, there are still glaring issues. Whether it’s the lack of a stricter dress code for participants to promote uniformity and aesthetic beauty, or the failure to properly showcase student-marchers, considering that our Greek parochial schools are interspersed with no rhyme or reason, as if Hellenic Paideia was not one of the most critical issues for the survival of Hellenism, there are serious issues that need to be examined through public discourse, and not just in the anterooms of the Federation.

Ultimately, either the Greek-American Community will manage to prioritize certain common values around which it will work in unison and strategically to upgrade the institutions that express them, or it will come apart, because the ‘tropos’ or manner of its distinct otherness will no longer be discernible, leading to withering and dissolution.

This column proposes that the present administrative crisis can be overcome through the application of the ancient democratic practice of sortition; that is, distribution of offices via a lottery system. In his work ‘Rhetoric’, Aristotle notes that “a Democracy is a form of government under which the citizens distribute the offices of state among themselves by lot” (1365b-1366a). Hence, if the Federation leadership invokes democracy as a defining quality of its mode of governance, then there should not be any problem with accepting the distribution of offices according to its signature trait.

On the contrary, the revival of this ancient element of democracy would serve as a sterling example for other organizations, while showcasing an essential aspect of democracy that is frequently overlooked in contemporary society. And while this trait may escape popular attention, it is not altogether absent from modern democratic polities. Two characteristic examples from the United States regarding the contemporary use of sortition include the selection of jurors for trials, and the draft, which is currently not in use, but still a legal requirement laid out in the selective service system. Now, if many of us just happen to view the former as an imposition and waste of time, and ward off the latter, it’s worth questioning just how democratically minded we truly are…
Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Landemore in Foreign Policy

Posted on December 10, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Prof. Hélène Landemore has a hard-hitting new article in Foreign Policy magazine. From the outset, Landemore’s subtitle aims right at the heart of modern democracy dogma:

Democracy as it was envisioned was never about real people power. That’s what needs to change.

This radical attack on the electoralist system keeps on coming, paragraph after paragraph. Landemore seems ready now to finally correct the conventional terminology (the unwillingness to do away with this convention was a huge burden for her in Open Democracy):

The systems in place today once represented a clear improvement on prior regimes—monarchies, theocracies, and other tyrannies—but it may be a mistake to call them adherents of democracy at all. The word roughly translates from its original Greek as “people’s power.” But the people writ large don’t hold power in these systems. Elites do.

Representative government, the ancestor of modern democracies, was born in the 18th century as a classical liberal-republican construct rather than a democratic one, primarily focused on the protection of certain individual rights rather than the empowerment of the broader citizenry. The goal was to give the people some say in choosing their rulers without allowing for actual popular rule.

The Founding Fathers of the United States, for example, famously wanted to create a republic rather than a democracy, which they associated with mob rule. James Madison, in particular, feared the tyranny of the majority as much as he disliked and rejected the old monarchical orders.

Another important attribute of the article is that Landemore is making it explicit that exclusion from government is not merely a matter of making people “feel involved”, but rather translates into unrepresented interests:
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Athens, Books, Deliberation, Elections, History, House of Lords, Juries, Mass action, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Call for 2021 review input

Posted on December 10, 2021 by Yoram Gat

This is the yearly call for input for the year’s end review. As in previous years, I would like to have a post or two summarizing the ongoings here at Equality-by-Lot and notable sortition-related events over the passing year. Any input about what should be included is welcome – either through comments below or via email. You are invited to refresh your memory about the events of the passing year by browsing Equality-by-Lot’s archives.

For previous years’ summaries see: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Large Scale Secure Sortition Part 3: What exactly did Cleve show was impossible? And what possibilities are left?

Posted on December 5, 2021 by graytmatter

This article assumes you’ve read my previous article “Large Scale Secure Sortition Part 1: Generating Randomness Collectively with In-Person Gatherings”. In particular it assumes a familiarity with the add-divide-remainder procedure for combining individual submissions to get a final random result.

This article explains the mathematical structure that makes collectively generating randomness difficult and introduces the four major approaches that can lead to systems that work. To do this we’ll go through a version of Cleve’s 1986 impossibility proof and call out the four major assumptions he makes as he makes them. Then we’ll explain how reversing each of those assumptions leads to a working method of collectively generating randomness and talk about its pros and cons.

In the world of CS theory the process of collectively generating randomness is called “multiparty coin flipping” and the seminal paper that kicked off the field was Cleve’s 1986 impossibility result. The paper proves that “it is impossible to have perfectly fair multiparty coin flipping unless a majority of those helping to ‘flip the coin’ are behaving honestly.” But if you keep digging you start finding papers that claim to have methods for fair multiparty coin flipping when just a single person is behaving honestly. Cleve’s proof was correct, but it made some specific assumptions about how those trying to flip the coin were able to structure their communications and what they wanted out of the process. Multiparty coin flipping is only possible if you take at least one of those assumptions and assume the opposite.

The first assumption is that at least half of the participants are dishonest (when we reverse this assumption later we assume that less than half of the participants are dishonest). Cleve is very upfront about this assumption and it is a good one to keep when thinking about designing sortition systems.

I’ll call out the other assumptions as the proof makes them. Let’s dive in.

The Proof

Imagine that Luka and Hugo instead of flipping a collective coin in person have to do it over text. The basic rules are the same: they both flip a coin, Hugo wins if they are both the same(heads heads or tails tails), Luka wins if they are different(heads tails or tails heads). If they both just send the results of their coin flip there’s a big problem. If Hugo sends his result (heads) first, Luka has the opportunity to lie about his (it actually came up heads, but he can say tails) and win unfairly. Or vice versa. Maybe they can agree to both send their result at exactly 12:00, but because online messages can take several seconds to arrive Luka might not be able to tell the difference between a message actually sent at 12:00 and one held back a moment and changed. If we are defining a formal way of collectively generating randomness online we have to assume that they trade off talking (Luka talks, then Hugo talks, then Luka talks). There’s no way to ensure any desired overlap. (This is the proof’s second assumption, and it’s a good one for online communication).

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Large Scale Secure Sortition Part 2: “Voting” from home with Non-Malleable Time Lock Puzzles

Posted on December 5, 2021 by graytmatter

This article assumes you’ve read my previous article “Large Scale Secure Sortition Part 1: Generating Randomness Collectively with In-Person Gatherings”. In particular it assumes a familiarity with the add-divide-remainder procedure for combining individual submissions to get a final random result.

This article proposes a backup protocol to compliment the one in the previous article that can be used without requiring people to gather in person. However it is so mathematically complicated that only CS and Math PhDs are likely to ever understand the proof of why it’s secure. Given that the goal of using these systems is to generate trust, I cannot recommend this as a primary option, though I can recommend it as a fallback during times (like extreme weather events or pandemics) where gathering large numbers of people is difficult.

Non-Malleable1 Time Lock Puzzles are cryptographic tools that allow you to hide information inside a computational puzzle. Once hidden, the information can only be accessed after the puzzle is solved. Making a time lock puzzle is kind of like turning a QR code into a jigsaw puzzle. If you give the puzzle to someone they’ll only be able to scan it after they’ve completed/solved the puzzle. The main difference is that Jigsaw puzzles can be solved in many different ways by doing the “this piece connects to this piece” steps in any order. Time Lock Puzzles can only be solved in 2 ways.

The first (called opening) is fast but requires a special key that is created alongside the puzzle and known only by its creator. The second (called forced opening) takes much longer and requires you to do a specific list of computations in a specific order. These computations have to be done sequentially (you only know what step 2 is after you finish step 1) so throwing hundreds of computers2 at the problem isn’t any better than using just one. When you create the puzzle you get to decide exactly how many steps it’ll take to solve the puzzle (by choosing how many “puzzle pieces” there are). And since we know about how quickly modern computers can do these steps, we can accurately estimate how long the puzzle will take to solve.

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Filed under: Sortition | 3 Comments »

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