Equality by lot

Large Scale Secure Sortition Part 1: Generating Randomness Collectively with In-Person Gatherings

Posted on December 5, 2021 by graytmatter

Matthew Gray is a Mathematician, Software Engineer, and Theoretical Computer Scientist currently teaching at Renton Technical College after working at Microsoft Norway. His primary research interests are in Secure Multiparty Computation, Quantum Cryptography, and Coding Theory. Over the last year he has been researching how sortition can be conducted in secure and trustworthy ways.

Judging from the aftermath of contested elections around the world, if large numbers of people question the fairness of a sortition selection there could be dire consequences. Our current systems for generating the randomness needed for selections are not secure enough to silence those questions, especially when used to select national representatives. The current systems are all centralized and non-participatory, some are vulnerable to local cheating, and all are vulnerable to sabotage from well-resourced malicious actors, such as state security services. This article proposes a new option. It lays out a specific decentralized and participatory method of selecting representatives by explains how two people can go about fairly choosing one of them to be selected and then showing how the method can be scaled up for larger selections. It also touches on some of the mathematics surrounding these methods.

Current systems for generating the randomness needed for drawings fall into two main categories. First are physical systems such as dice, floating balls, or names in hats. These work better in small communities where every member can show up and observe. But even in those spaces, if people distrust their neighbors, they will worry about the dice being weighted or someone sneaking extra copies of their name into the hat. Second are digital systems that take some outside sources of randomness and process them to get some final randomness. These outside sources of randomness include stock market indexes, lava lamps, or cameras whose lenses have been painted over.

Digital systems tend to involve math that is fairly complicated, don’t feel that random, and aren’t interesting to look at. Also, because of the complicated math involved, there’s a chance that these processes aren’t actually random after all. Neither category produces systems that involve citizens or are particularly resilient to sabotage efforts. Weighting dice or hacking a computer is easy. Manipulating the stock market is hard but may not be beyond the abilities of a state security service. However if we include everyone in the process of generating the randomness we can create systems that have no single point of failure.

To introduce the ideas used by the system I am about to propose, let’s imagine that the team captains (Luka and Hugo) in the last FIFA World Cup didn’t trust the coin that was going to be used at the start of the match. One way they could generate the “coin flip” together is for both captains to bring their own coins and flip them simultaneously. If both coins land on the same side (i.e. both heads or both tails) then France wins the coin toss, if they land on different sides (i.e. heads tails or tails heads) then Croatia wins. What is important to note here is that even if one coin is weighted, as long as the other one is unweighted, then the overall “coin flip” is fair.

*Figure 1. The odds of each possible result when one captain brings an 80/20 coin, and the other brings a 50/50 coin.*

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Filed under: Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: randomization | 26 Comments »

Gauchebdo: Sortition – a false solution

Posted on December 4, 2021 by Yoram Gat

The following piece was recently published on Gauchebdo (“Left Weekly”), a Swiss website which bills itself as “a platform for men and women who resist, the voice of those who propose to change society”.

Sortition – a false solution
Anaïs Timofte

Sortition has become over the last few years an idea which is garnering increasing attention. Whether in the context of deliberative citizen assemblies concerning the climate, or of the selection of candidates for the executive bodies of social movements, or of the random ordering of candidates on an electoral list, there is no shortage of examples.

Some promoters of sortition go farther and see it as an alternative mode of representation and to the election of parliament members. They see is as a way to “renew the democratic process” having the advantage of dissipating the “elitism” of the electoral process. But is this really the case?

Greek origins

Sortition is far from being a new idea. The most famous example is that of Athens in ancient Greece. The Council, composed of 500 Athenian citizens wielding significant legislative and executive powers, was allotted in a well defined and controlled process. In order to handle numerous tasks, the allotted citizens had at their disposal “public slaves”, owned by the city, whom they managed.

Other examples often evokes as part of the history of sortition are those of the medieval communes of 13th century Italy: Verona, Venice and Perugia. These cities developed modes of selection combining elections and sortition.

Sortition and capitalism

Even though there is something intriguing in the idea of imagining the powers-that-be reproduce today sophisticated (and largely fantastic) selection methods used by the Athenian democracy and of Venice of the Doges, it is nevertheless necessary to understand sortition within the framework of the current capitalist system and within the framework of the organization of working classes that aim to move beyond this system. 5 point of criticism may be raised:

First, sortition leads to a depolitization of the process of selection, and more precisely, a dissipation of class conflict. The candidates no longer need to defend ideas or a conception of society – their individual or social-professional characteristics suffice.
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Filed under: Athens, History, Press, Sortition | 57 Comments »

Sortition for judges on the ballot in Switzerland

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Yoram Gat

The Swiss Radio Lac reports:

Sortition is proposed

[In addition to other proposals] the Swiss will also have to vote [on November 28th] on the proposition regarding the judicial system. The proposition would institute appointment of judges using sortition in order to make them more independent. Official languages would have to be equitably represented and the judges would be able to serve up to 5 years beyond the normal age of retirement.

Parliament has rejected the text, without offering a counter-proposition, either direct or indirect. According to the elected, sortition would not guarantee better independence or better equality. Moreover, it would damage the democratic legitimacy of the judges.

Judges in Switzerland are currently appointed by the Swiss Parliament and they need to be re-appointed periodically. The notion that this provides judges with “democratic legitimacy” runs against standard liberal dogma:

At present, the Swiss parliament awards the posts of federal judge according to party strength. Judges with no political affiliation thus have no chance of gaining office.

When a judge is elected, she or he has to hand over money to the party – the so-called mandate tax, which is unique in the world, and constitutes an important source of funding for parties. In return, the judge can count on party support when it comes to re-election.

In this system, the judiciary is therefore politicised. Judges can be influenced by their party membership when passing verdicts, as studies have shown. And not just out of ideological considerations. Parties sometimes also exert tangible pressure. If they do not approve of a ruling, they can threaten not to re-elect the judge.

This mutual dependence calls into question the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers. […] The Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) has also rebuked Switzerland.

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

Citizens’ Assembly in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Posted on November 21, 2021 by paulnollen

The EU delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina reports:

The EU in BiH [Bosnia and Herzegovina] has launched the Citizens’ Assembly, an innovative model of deliberative democracy, which offers a unique opportunity for citizens in BiH to directly express their views on constitutional and electoral reform, to recommend concrete solutions for elimination of the discriminatory provisions in the BiH Constitution as well as for improvement of the Election Law. This process is based on two rounds of sortition, practice of random selection of citizens as a representative sample of a country’s population. During the preparatory phase of the process a team of local and international experts and the independent company specialized in polling representative samples of the BiH population (IPSOS) jointly developed the methodology for random selection of citizens’ and completed the first round of sortition. The letter signed by the EU, the US and OSCE Ambassadors in BiH was sent to 4,000 randomly selected households in BiH, inviting citizens to express their interest in participating in the Citizens’ Assembly.
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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Sortition | 11 Comments »

Short refutations of common arguments for sortition (part 2)

Posted on November 17, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 is here.

The two arguments presented below pin the problem with elections on the voters.

4. The masses are rationally ignorant. Therefore any system that relies on their judgement would not function well. Sortition does not rely on mass judgement.

According to this argument elections present a variety of choices to the voters, with some of these choices being on the whole materially better than others as measured by the interests and values of the voters. The voters, however, each knowing that the impact of their vote is tiny, are too selfish (or more politely, too busy taking care of their private business) to spend the time and effort to determine which candidate or party are better than others. Instead they hope that others would do the work for them, and in this way they would save the effort of figuring out which alternatives are the better ones but at the same time they will enjoy the good outcomes of other people’s choices. But since everybody, or at least the large majority of voters, follow the same calculation, almost everybody is uninformed and as a result when they arrive at the voting booth, they often select poor alternatives.

All this sounds very sophisticated and has the stamp of approval of the economists and rational-choice theorists. The argument suffers, however, from at least two severe problems. First, the assumption that the electoral alternatives present to voters a meaningful choice is theoretically problematic. Since the electoral choice is between elite factions, the range of choice must be severely limited. The factions of the elite all share certain elite values and interests that any of them will promote if and when they are in power. The promotion of those values and interests is often made at the expense of the values and interests of the general population, making the policies pursued by government – regardless of the elite faction in power – detrimental to the general population.
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 17 Comments »

Waxman and McCulloch: The Democracy Manifesto

Posted on November 16, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Wayne Waxman, a retired professor of modern philosophy, and Alison McCulloch, a scholar of philosophy and retired journalist (as well as a contributor to this blog), have just published a book named The Democracy Manifesto: A Dialogue on Why Elections Need to be Replaced with Sortition.

The Democracy Manifesto is about how to recreate democracy by replacing elections with government that is truly of, by and for the people. Written in engaging and accessible dialogue form, the book argues that the only truly democratic system of government is one in which decision-makers are selected randomly (by sortition) from the population at large, operating much the way trial juries do today, but 100% online, enabling people to govern together even across great distances. Sortition has a storied history but what sets The Democracy Manifesto apart is its comprehensive account of how it can be implemented not only across all sectors and levels of government, but throughout society as well, including the democratization of mass media, corporations, banks, and other large institutions. The resulting Sortitive Representative Democracy (SRD) is the true heir to ancient Greek democracy, and the only means of ensuring ‘we the people’ are represented by our fellow citizens rather than by the revolving groups of elites that dominate electoral systems. In the process, the book grapples with myriad hot topics including economic issues, international relations, indigenous rights, environmentalism and more.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 32 Comments »

Meyer-Resende: Citizen assemblies do not address the biggest problem in democracies

Posted on November 13, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Michael Meyer-Resende writes in the EUobserver:

[M]any climate activists want to expand democracy. They are deeply frustrated with the insufficient response to the threat of global heating.

There is much talk that the old institutions of representative democracy are not good enough to meet the challenge. “Politicians simply can’t see past the next election,” says the group Extinction Rebellion. The role of citizens is reduced to voting once every four or five years. Or so the argument goes.

That is why one idea has gained much enthusiasm among climate activists: citizen assemblies.

In these assemblies, people who are drawn by lot from pre-defined groups that broadly represent society, hear from experts, discuss what should be done about climate change and adopt recommendations, or even decisions.
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Filed under: Press, Sortition | Tagged: Climate | 1 Comment »

Short refutations of common arguments for sortition (part 1)

Posted on November 6, 2021 by Yoram Gat

Some years ago I wrote a set of posts refuting several standard arguments against sortition (1, 2, 3, 4).

It seems useful, however, to refute some oft-offered arguments for sortition as well. These are arguments that provide a poor foundation for the idea of applying sortition in government. Such arguments are made, and repeated reflexively, by academics, by members of the sortition-milieu, by sortition activists, in the press, and by others who discuss sortition. Often, in addition to being factually or logically unsound, these arguments also lead to advocacy of the application of sortition in ways that are bound to lead to a failure to realize the full democratizing potential of sortition, and in some cases are bound to lead to complete discrediting of the entire notion.

The first three arguments presented (and refuted) here all deal with supposed superior competence of an allotted chamber over an elected one. All suffer from essentially the same flaw. In fact, the advantage of an allotted chamber over an elected one is not that it is more competent but that it is more representative.

1. Allotted bodies would carry out real deliberation whereas elected bodies are the setting for partisan performances and grandstanding.

This argument is a favorite of propounders of “deliberative democracy”. According to this argument, a major reason that public policy is poor is that it is not determined through meaningful deliberation. Supposedly, the elected are too busy electioneering, or are too stubborn ideologically to deliberate with each other and develop good, common sense, widely popular policy. But why would a government with a majority in the legislature avoid deliberating within itself – in public or behind closed doors – in order to produce policy that would make it popular? Are they too stupid? If what they seek is “good policy”, or even if they just seek reelection and if deliberation could produce policy options that would make them more popular and increase their chance for reelection, why would they be unable to engage in such deliberation?
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory | 20 Comments »

34% of White Uni Applicants lie about their race, says study

Posted on November 4, 2021 by Conall Boyle

A clear case for banning contentious category quizzing, and the use of randomised selection for ALL qualified applicants?

Read on

https://news.yahoo.com/survey-34-white-college-students-173329031.html

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Report Back from the Hannah Arendt Center Conference on Sortition, part 3/3

Posted on November 3, 2021 by Ahmed R. Teleb

Shmuel Lederman: “Representative Democracy”

Lederman’s intervention began with a theme quite familiar to this forum but one that still surprises the general public, probably due to our prevailing Whiggish and/or mythological approach to teaching political history—at least in the US.

Until the 19^th century, elections were considered “an anti-democratic or aristocratic form of government.” It was assumed that winners of elections would be powerful or celebrity-like figures, Lederman underscored. The question that he attempts to answer is, “how did elections come to be associated with ‘democracy’ beginning in the early 1800s?” In an upcoming APSR [I think] article he argues that European Imperialism and Colonialism had to do with the recognition of elections as “democratic.” Lederman reasons that one cannot separate—as Western political theorists have—John Stuart Mill’s thoughts on the proper form of government for India (and other “barbarian and semi-barbarian” parts of the world)–tutelage or “enlightened despotism”–from his thoughts on “the only rational form of government” (for civilized Europeans) generally. You “cannot take out the East India Co.” from Mill’s thought and be left with something democratic, insists Lederman.

Rather, Lederman explained, there is a common thread between the “civilizing” trope in regard to the “backward” places on Earth in the 19^th century and the “meritocracy” myth behind today’s electoral representative government. “Enlightened despotism” and “representative government” were and remain mutually reinforcing ideas.

Lederman underscores that there were democratic alternatives to representative government at the beginning of the 19^th century (and earlier). There were, for example, among workers’ movements schemes for pyramidal council systems that would involve the population as a whole in decision making. The very fact that Mill, like the American founders and French republicans, had to make a case for representative government reflects the fact those alternatives were seen as a threat. [One might add that perhaps humans are not by nature simply willing to let others rule over them; but that might get this blog censored for being “populist.”] Evidence that the council system and freedom as self-government, the themes of Arendt’s On Revolution, were not mere aberrations in her political thinking, Lederman adds, can be found in her letters to her long-time friend and mentor Karl Jaspers. In the letter Arendt expresses her pleasure that the book earned his “approval,” because “every word you wrote strikes at the very heart of what I mean to say… Heinrich’s experience, of councils, to the experience of America.”

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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Deliberation, Experiments, Participation, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: Conference, democracy, freedom, Hannah Arendt, sortition | 42 Comments »