12 ms·

The Case for Abolishing Elections

78 points by haakonhr 4y ago

causality0 4y ago
I've held this view for a long time, since the day I realized the average politician was morally inferior to the average citizen.
- kqr 4y ago
  Yeah, it's such an obvious selection bias toward good optics at the expense of content.
- loicd 4y ago
  The problem is that averages are constructs of the mind. It is a fallacy to think that random citizens are average citizens. You can average numbers, you cannot average people.
benmmurphy 4y ago
Sortition is also much easier to protect from fraud than voting. Generating shared randomness in a way that can’t be rigged is a straight forward well studied problem. For example everyone who wants to take part generates a random value and publishes a public pre-commitment. Then all the random values are revealed, checked against the pre-commitments and xor’d to produce the final random value. All of this can be verified by a member of the public and any member of the public could take part. Issues around rigging the electoral roll are less of an issue than in voting because the person selected has to show up to do their job. It is far less effective to have dead people on the electoral roll because someone will need to impersonate the dead person if they are selected.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  These are brilliant ideas. But we do not yet live in a society that is technologically ready for them. Sure. we can create the protocols, logic and software. As a technical prospect it's within reach. All beautiful in theory. But can you imagine the corruption that would ensue?! Where would people store these tokens that represent literal political power? How would they verifiably redeem them? The problem is infrastructure. Civic cybersecurity is a great steaming turd. Digital literacy has declined as people surrender in the face of "convenience". Smartphones are wide open gaping holes, pre-pwned out of the box by vendor malware. Much of our electronic communication is designed and built in hostile nation states, served by a handful of greedy and untrustworthy big-tech monopolies, and overseen by governments who actively labour night and day to weaken our security. Until we live in an entirely different kind of technological culture, where people take more ownership of their technology (probably not within my own lifetime) I'll choose a piece of paper and a wooden box with a slot in it any day! That would be my informed choice as a computer scientist. Although, it is possible that with some clever mathematics and manufacturing technology (modern physical cash is an advanced technology) some kind of paper equivalent might be feasible. But first consider what happened in Russia when the people were issued share certificates in the ex-soviet economy and bartered them for food.
  - user_named 4y ago
    What are you talking about? No software needed other than a random number generator. After election it's all about identity. We know how to handle identity for hundreds of years already. Thousands even.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      > it's all about identity. We know how to handle identity for hundreds of years already. Well.. most developed countries do. But for America specifically, it has been a contentious matter.
- ajjenkins 4y ago
  Can you provide more detail on how this would actually work or somewhere I can read more about this? Like, if there are two people participating and one’s random number is 01 and the other’s is 11 (binary), and you XOR them you get 10. But that doesn’t match any of the participants’ numbers, so who would win? Or does the number of possible outputs need to exactly match the number of participants? If so, does that mean the number of participants needs to be an exact power of 2?
  - dllthomas 4y ago
    Participants generating numbers are only helping ensure the result is random. You collectively pick a number, and then use that to select a person from a predetermined(!) list (presumably picking a very large number mod the size of the list to get an index in the list).
  - benmmurphy 4y ago
    You can also just add all the random numbers chosen between 0 and n-1 and take the result modulo n. So just normal modular arithmetic no xor.
valeg 4y ago
It may work in local elections but nation wide elections require the popular mandate. Humans like to believe that they have a stake in the system, however small.
- defrost 4y ago
  Easy enough hybrid fix; those people that are judged to perform well in direct sortition local area politics who also wish to further that work are in the pool for a combination draw|election for state roles .. and then tier upwards to national. The general public get to know their national candidates first at the local and then state level, and those candidates are judged as "better than a head of lettuce" by their peers in office. The political wing of government is essentially (ideally) just about debating policy - it's the civil service, military, and judicial wings that get tasked with making things happen (subject to checks and balances).
  - valeg 4y ago
    Yes, bottom up. Risks are localised. It may work very well for local judges and regulatory bodies.
- dudul 4y ago
  Monarchies have worked for longer than democracies have been around. People had no stakes in the system and were fine with it for thousands of years.
  - valeg 4y ago
    The Mandate of Heaven as a concept expired long ago. Only DPRK uses it for legitimacy rn.
BMc2020 4y ago
The revelation came while Bouricius was working on a housing committee. “The committee members were an outgoing and garrulous bunch,” he observed. “Shy wallflowers almost never become legislators.” More disturbing, he noted how his fellow politicians—all of whom owned their homes—tended to legislate in favor of landlords and against tenants. “I saw that the experiences and beliefs of legislators shape legislation far more than facts,” he said. “After that, I frequently commented that any 150 Vermonters pulled from the phone book would be more representative than the elected House membership.”
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  We elected the electable, not necessarily those most appropriate for the role. Furthermore, in the majority of cases, we are only allowed to elect those who are pre-approved by The Red Party or The Blue Party. Both parties have biases. Worse they, like the examples mentioned, tend to leans towards self-serving (the party) and/or serving their own mwmbers (i.e., don't offer the best possible representation). It's like cliques in high school all over again. What I'd like to see is simple. Add "None of the above" to every race. Let The People fully express themselves. Let them give the parties direct feedback about the products they're marketing. Yes, that's kind of what not voting it. Unfortunately, the fact is, the parties don't recognize that as a possible "Crap products" votes. They can phantom that. NotA would stuff it right in their face.
  - 0dayz 4y ago
    I can see this might be true in highly corrupt countries. I think it's easy to preach this idea that political parties only serve itself and don't care about anything else. In truth it's something that is more or less required to be effective since voting is only 1 part of it (someone had to write the legislation and do investigations). Of course the party cares what their members think otherwise what would be the point of being a member of said political party. And lastly it needs to be stressed if a political party or candidate don't listen to their voters then (if it's a fair election) they won't be re-elected.
  - sfgd 4y ago
pjc50 4y ago
I'd like to see sortition tried somewhere, but not as a full replacement for elections. Maybe it would be a good replacement for the House of Lords.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  i wouldn't mind sortition as long as there was a way to at least "unelect" the person in the case that someone really turned out bad for whatever reason
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Note that very few places have this for elected representatives during their term. The UK recently got one: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04594/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04... - MPs can be recalled if they are jailed. Quite significant as during the Northern Ireland civil war several MPs were political prisoners.
- dudul 4y ago
  Worked in Athens for a few centuries.
andrewstuart 4y ago
I like the idea of expendable democratic power. It works something like this: Each voter gets say (for example) 1,000 votes, which they allocate to whichever parties they want at election time. The number of votes a party gets become its “currency”. Any political party can put forward legislation to become law. They back their legislation with some number of their votes/currency. Other parties can defeat legislation by spending a greater number of their votes to stop it. When a party has spent all its votes/currency, it must wait till the next election to get more.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  As proposed, that seems sure to result in a series of unattractive-to-one-side legislation backed by 1 vote requiring the other side to use 2 votes to stop. You could 2:1 amplify the power of your votes by creating a bullshit generator and the side with the most voluminous BS would end up with the only votes left.
- 0dayz 4y ago
  It might sound good on paper but I think in practice you would have various ways of exploiting the system or the system breaks down (what if say the left party has spent all its points fighting against tax cuts so now it doesn't have enough points to increase welfare and Healthcare programs or vice versa with the right party).
  - andrewstuart 4y ago
    That’s not a disadvantage, that’s a feature. That the way it’s meant to work. It’s precisely intended that if a party wants to spend all its its capital opposing, then it does that at the cost of being able to advance its own policies.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If it costs me two votes to oppose your legislation, but only one vote to introduce superseding legislation (which could supersede multiple of your legislative items), this seems like a much less stable system than today. Chaos in law-making is probably worse than the disaster of two-party first-past-the-post.
account-5 4y ago
Sounds like demarchy to me.
atemerev 4y ago
Oh come on. We already have a working system: direct democracy. An entire well-developed country works like this: Switzerland (and quite successfully). I absolutely do not understand why it is not adopted elsewhere (except politicians egos, of course, and this is quite a strong force to overcome).
- ramraj07 4y ago
  Switzerland is never a good example. A homogenous small nation that’s immensely gifted resource wise, is rich by any measure of that word, and is immune and protected from damn near anything, can make any system work. Most nations are not like that.
  - julienreszka 4y ago
    >Switzerland >Homogenous There are four language regions, how is it homogenous.
    - ramraj07 4y ago
      There are more languages spoken in individual provinces in india. Language is not a source of heterogeneity. Pretty much all heterogeneity in the world was invented and entrenched due to colonial rule, so you can hopefully understand what I mean by not heterogenous.
  - atemerev 4y ago
    “Immensely gifted resource-wise”? In what world? Also, it speaks four languages, and more than a quarter of its population are immigrants — not what I’d call “homogeneous”. Switzerland is an exception (and a rich one) _because_ it is a direct democracy, I’d argue.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Switzerland's been exceptional for many decades. They managed to remain genuinely neutral during both World Wars even as the world melted down right outside their borders, remain one of the few governments not dominated by the copyright cartel (for instance personal use copyright infringement is legal in Switzerland), and of course their direct democracy system. They do their own system, and they do it in a very social and capable fashion. But how long will this last? By contrast over there was an interesting recent poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454449 The majority of Americans now support new stimulus checks to combat inflation. I'm increasingly persuaded by Plato's 5 Regime's view. In a nutshell, each system has its own virtue which taken to extremes becomes its vice and leads to its downfall and transition into the next system. The 5 regimes being Aristocracy, Timocracy (an implicitly anti-materialist government driven by systems of honor - think Spartans or Klingons - the Wiki page on this topic is simply wrong), Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny.
mberning 4y ago
At this point a philosopher king sounds way better to me.
duxup 4y ago
I wonder how hard is it to pay off random people? Also who writes what could be complex legislation for complex issues?
- wanderingbort 4y ago
  One of the good things about crypto and blockchain is that I can say with great confidence that it is both easy and inexpensive. For reference see one of the biggest NFT drops this year and the pleas they made to not buy KYC’d addresses: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a-kycd-wallet-for-the-bored-apes-teams-otherside-mint/ https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a...
  - duxup 4y ago
    Crypto’s best use case!
- kqr 4y ago
  Do we need complex legislation for complex issues? There was a discussion here on HN a few days ago where some people argued that maybe it's better to legislate just for the simpler, common cases, and exceptions will always have to be exceptions and judged case by case in court.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Yes how a law is written is important.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  >Also who writes what could be complex legislation for complex issues? The same people who currently write it - policy analysts and lawyers.
mintaka5 4y ago
make it like jury duty. randomly select taxpayers to represent people for short terms. i'd prefer a random concerned citizen making decisions for a month over 2/4 years of a corruptible do-nothing elitist. keep the representation constantly rotating. more people is more ideas, more consensus, and closer to reality for most of us <---
- onos 4y ago
  This is what they did at times in ancient Athens. One positive was that the average citizen was much more aware of the concerns of the city than would occur if only a select few were running things.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    But not every one in Athens was a citizen. There were many slaves etc. This is election as per 18th century Britain elections by the propertied classes.
- geomark 4y ago
  Have you ever served on a jury? My three times were eye opening. Very few of my fellow jurors had the slightest ability to perform critical thinking. Most paid no attention to the jury instructions and simply voted their biases. I can't imagine how bad they would be as civil leaders.
  - kqr 4y ago
    I don't think anyone is saying these people would be competent. Just on average more competent than a career politician. If you're baffled by the average jury, you should see what the politicians are like!
  - lapcat 4y ago
    There are a number of problems with juries: 1. They're too small. 2. They're not totally random. The attorneys are allowed to eliminate members of the pool. 3. The jury doesn't actually run the trial. Nor do they run the police department, for that matter. The trial is run by the judge and the attorneys. The jury is mostly passive listeners. They're spoon-fed info at the trial and not even allowed to know all the facts. 4. Jury terms are too short. Contrary to what the previous commenter suggested, it's not ideal to have short terms. Citizen legislators should probably serve 1 or 2 year times. They need time to learn how to do the job. They probably need preparation before they take the job.
szundi 4y ago
If this system is established, the corruption will come in pretty fast into this one too. Even easier because there is just so few people to influence in short time.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Even easier because there is just so few people to influence in short time. What do you mean by so few people? The size of the legislatures wouldn't necessarily change, so it's the same number of people at any given time, and since there's no reelection, it ends up being a larger number of people overall. And I would say it's harder to corrupt people you don't have relationship with. Whereas long-serving politicians develop relationships with lobbyists over the years. The biggest reduction of corruption is the elimination of campaign contributions, which is essentially legalized bribery. This leaves only illegal bribery, which can be prosecuted. You could audit randomly selected legislators for years after they leave office to make sure they're not taking bribes.
  - kqr 4y ago
    It's also hard to build relationships with future members of the legislature when there's a pool of 10 million to choose from, rather than the 5000 or so career politicians we have in the current system.
    - headsoup 4y ago
      I'm sure there are many piles of ready lobby cash that will happily build new relationships in no time at all
  - ajjenkins 4y ago
    One reason corruption might increase with sortition is that it would be much cheaper to successfully bribe a representative. Most politicians are rich so it’s very expensive to make a bribe worthwhile to them. But if people with less money are in power, they might be swayed by smaller bribes. Also, they don’t have as much to lose if they’re caught accepting a bribe. If a career politician is caught accepting a bribe, their career as a politician is over. But if a mechanic is caught accepting a bribe during their 2 year stint as a representative, they would suffer minimal reputational damage and could just go back to being a mechanic. You also mentioned that you could prevent this with harsh penalties and long term audits, but I think it would be pretty easy to circumvent an audit. Like, if I wanted to bribe someone elected by sortition, I would just offer them free stuff instead of money so it’s harder to trace. Like free hotel stays or prepaid gift cards. I could imagine apolitical people treating a sortition win like winning the lottery and expecting to get money out of it. And just auctioning their vote off to the highest bidder. With all that said though, there would be a lot of advantages to sortition so the risk of corruption and bribery might still be worth it and would still probably be better than our current system.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
We need councils running everything, democratically elected councils whose members are instantly recallable upon a vote. That will ensure they are responsive to the needs of people.
- antihero 4y ago
  Surely if they were instantly recallable it would incentive extremely short term thinking as opposed to long term strategic plans which may involve some difficulty in the short term?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sfgd 4y ago
Ancient India has several instances where the next ruler was selected by the royal elephant. Of course, it was not meant to be random, as the elephant would pick a righteous person capable of steering the kingdom at that time.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  Look into the elections for the Doge of Venice: (via https://www.rangevoting.org/VenHist.html https://www.rangevoting.org/VenHist.html) > Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]: > - Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process; > - Reduce them to 9 by random processes; > - The 9 name 40 nominees; > - The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process; > - the 12 name 25 nominees; > - Reduce them to 9 by random processes; > - The 9 name 45 nominees; > - Reduce them to 11 by random processes; > - The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be age≥40 years); > - The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting! > - This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice – they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto.
captainmuon 4y ago
I think it is nonsense to try to fix politics by making it even more arbitrary. The biggest problem in the US is the electorial system that leads to two parties with each close to 50%. Elections are so close that it is essentially meaningless. Is a party with 50.1% really more legitimized to rule than the one with 49.9%? Step one to fix democracy would be to get rid of the winner-takes-all system. Not only would this make more than two parties viable. You would also fix that most of the country's vote doesn't contribute at all (since people live in "safe" counties where they have little influence on the outcome.) Then, when elections are won with clear margins, yes, you could abolish elections, and replace them by representative polls! The benefit is that polls are much cheaper, you can do them much more frequently, and the people can change bad policy quicker. It might be controversial, but I like that you can also apply "reweighting" to polls to make them more representative.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  The point of sortition is to apply the benefits of representative polling but while allowing the people polled to take the time to deeply research and understand the issue. I don't see anything that is arbitrary about the process.
- dudul 4y ago
  "Even more arbitrary"? The current system is not arbitrary at all.
- permo-w 4y ago
  proportional representation rarely leads to elections won with clear margins
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Did you mean to point to that as a problem? Because all this means is that minorities can not be stumbled upon.
    - origin_path 4y ago
brianolson 4y ago
They're suggesting 'government by jury', but what I expect it will turn out to be is 'government by the permanent bureaucracy'. The staffers who are there all the time will make suggestions to the current jury that is making decisions, and those decisions will probably 90% go with what the staffers suggest.
- CPLX 4y ago
  In their defense this is our current system, instead our lottery is confined to a smaller group of rich megalomaniacs.
  - trowawee 4y ago
    Right, the current system is 40% government via bureaucracy, 50% government via lobbyists/industry (including the parts of the bureaucracy that have been fully captured by industry), and 10% "the kind of freaks who run for and win public office" (who I think we should treat with reflexive suspicion on principle, even when I nominally agree with them). It's not at all clear to me that bureaucrats + lottery system would be worse, and it seems likely it'd be better.
julienreszka 4y ago
Anybody's who gives this idea more than a minute of thought quickly finds out this is utter nonsense.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  Since I've spent over a decade this thinking about this, and think it clearly the best way to solve the problem of election, perhaps you'd care to enlighten me on why it seems like nonsense?
  - julienreszka 4y ago
    Democracy by lottery is a very ancient idea, one that was tried in Athens and quickly abandoned because it resulted in disastrous consequences for the city. The consequences were so bad that the idea was never seriously considered again until now. Among the consequences: - The lot was usually determined by birth, so it tended to perpetuate privilege. - People who didn't want to serve often found ways to get out of it, so the people who ended up serving were often the ones who didn't want to. - It resulted in a lot of incompetent people in positions of power. - And perhaps worst of all, it tended to breed a culture of resentment and envy, since the people who were chosen by lot often felt that they didn't deserve it and the people who weren't chosen often felt that they did. The idea that democracy by lottery is a good idea is simply absurd.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      > Democracy by lottery is a very ancient idea, one that was tried in Athens Yes, the article covers this. > and quickly abandoned because it resulted in disastrous consequences for the city. You're gonna need a citation for this. > The consequences were so bad that the idea was never seriously considered again until now. This is not factually accurate. The article mentions that sortition was seriously considered by some founders. It has also been used in various forms throughout the world. Several of those examples are discussed throughout this thread.
  - loicd 4y ago
    I am not OP, but it seems to me that there is an obvious problem with it. If you select a truly random set of citizens to rule a country, there are no guarantees that you will get a representative sample of the citizenry. That's simply not how statistics work. Without any further selection, you will eventually (and sooner than you would expect) put terrible or incompetent people in power. Now, if the randomly selected citizens must go through a selection process or be moderated by experts, then the actual power is in the selection process and moderation, and there is nothing democratic about it. For what it is worth, I am French, and my country recently made a sortition experiment[1] that I found less than convincing. This was in response to the yellow vest movement. I did not feel represented by that 'citizens convention'. I do not know what part of their propositions come from them, and what part come from the experts advising them. Some of their propositions (like putting a more stringent speed limit on highways) were not implemented because, ironically, they were impopular. The whole thing felt like a failed experiment to me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
jongjong 4y ago
I think democracy by lottery may be a good idea provided that the outcome of the lottery can be trusted. It could be done through a cryptographically-verifiable (e.g. blockchain-based) random number generator. The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician. I don't think it would be a problem if politicians ended up more naive as a result. Just having well-meaning politicians would be a significant step up. That said, I think we should rely less on government intervention in the economy. We need to fix the monetary system to provide a level playing field, then once that's done, we need to trim back regulations. The way to solve the corporate monopolization problem is through increased competition. The government's primary role should be to promote maximum decentralization. The government should not concern itself with equality of outcomes; it should only concern itself with equality of opportunities. It should not think about efficiency; it should trust the free market to take care of that.
- dxdm 4y ago
  > The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician. This claim needs some back up. I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician". What separates them is the opportunity, and having a system in place that works to keep people honest. I'm watching my fellow citizens litter and help themselves to "free stuff", and the behavior of freshly minted "politicians" who get voted in by disgruntled voters of formerly fringe parties (or formerly fringe wings of established parties). I'd like to hear how you propose to keep the "average citizen" principled in the face of increased access to opportunity and power.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    >I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician" That's silly. The politician is completing in a race that they are trying to win. The citizen is just trying to live, and takes time out of their life to vote and pick someone who might (might!) have a shot at fixing some of the things that annoy them without breaking some of the things that actually work. The politician is goal-oriented, the citizen is existence-oriented.
choeger 4y ago
While random choice has some merit, it ignores some basic requirements of legislation: Legislation is interfacing with the executive and judicial branches (and you definitely don't want to randomly select your judges and governors). This interface works through legalese and other techniques. So someone with a certain experience or training in these techniques will be able to write better laws. Also, legislation necessarily works through specialization and work in committees. That's another thing people can learn to do better. That's where political parties are actually useful. Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses. Also, people have many different identies at the same time but but cannot represent them all equally well, anyways. So some aspects of society wouldn't be represented at all during a legislative period because everyone is supposed to represent their own identities, not someone else's. So unless we create a legislative assembly that's so large that it borders on direct democracy, I don't see the benefit. And in that case, let's just have direct democracy. If necessary with a legal requirement to vote.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Legislation is interfacing with the executive and judicial branches Why do you assume there would be 3 branches of government like the current system? As the article discusses, the founders of the US divided the government in order to dilute democracy and maintain the power of the economic elite.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  > So someone with a certain experience or training in these techniques will be able to write better laws. Also, legislation necessarily works through specialization and work in committees. Lawmakers today rarely write the legislation they vote on. They have support staff and experts who assist them in drafting legislation. Nothing prevents providing similar infrastructure to representatives selected by sortition rather than elections. > Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses. Um... What? Minorities would unequivocally be better represented under sortition than under elections. Poor people would be better represented, women would be better represented, young people would be better represented. The primary group that would loser it's massive overrepresentation is the old rich white lawyers who dominate our current house and senate. Your argument here makes no sense.
christkv 4y ago
This is what I’ve always supported because it kills political parties dead and their corrupting influence.
at_a_remove 4y ago
How swiftly the meme has changed from "If we don't win, democracy dies!" to "Since we didn't win, let's get rid of elections!" See also "Our candidate didn't win because of the electoral college, so let's get rid of that" and "Let's make people vote on Brexit again, since they voted wrong the last time." These people are almost charmingly shameless. Rather than do better, they just want to put the fix in for the next time.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  Supporters of sortition have been pushing it a lot longer than the current election cycle. Rather than dismissing "these people", perhaps you would benefit from engaging intellectually with the idea. If you did, you would probably find that the supporters of this idea are very different from what you are imagining.
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    It's the timing. Why, suddenly, this article here! What a coinkidink, hunh? I'm quite familiar with the concept and have had to implement non-FPtP voting schemes. However, it is a trap to engage with the disingenuous.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      The article was clearly timed to coincide with the US elections. That's why it was published the day before the election! Please don't try to shut down discussions with poorly constructed conspiracy theories.
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        "The article was clearly timed to coincide with the US elections. That's why it was published the day before the election!" That's the same "conspiracy theory" he's talking about..
        4y ago
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I quite like sortition and citizens assemblies, but it's amazing how much pushback there is to even minor moves towards further democracy (proportional representation etc.) and how much energy is spent undermining the limited democracy that exists so I feel uncomfortable with the headline.
nemo44x 4y ago
Yeah let’s appoint leadership that on day 1 asks “what should we do?”. What could go wrong there? Love it or hate it but a minority of better organized elites will always run the show in every organization from a local bake sale to government.
zzzeek 4y ago
It pains me greatly to not be sarcastic about this but I cannot help but think this article would not be making it to the front page of HN a day after the Democrats clinched the Senate majority, had the midterm elections favored the Republican party as everyone expected.
- lapcat 4y ago
  The article was published 6 days ago, before the election. You're reading way too much into the timing.
  - zzzeek 4y ago
    it arrived on hacker news front page today, is what I am referring towards. Here's an idea, let's try first having PG give YCombinator funding to startups based on a random lottery, rather than actually picking them. When that's successful, then we can talk.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > it arrived on hacker news front page today, is what I am referring towards. It arrived on the front page today because it was submitted today, and because it's an interesting and relevant article, regardless of the election result. You'll have to ask the submitter haakonhr about the timing, but 6 days is a reasonable amount of time to discover, read, and submit an article from the Boston Review.
rplst8 4y ago
If the candidates that are put up in the general aren't what people want, why did they win the primary?
- willis936 4y ago
  Because primaries are not democratic. Political parties are not democratic entities.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    That depends they are. However the issue is that the party members are a small proportion of the general public. Thus a small group is enough to win the vote in the party, This tends in a two party system to make the winner more extreme and less likely to be liked by the general public. See Liz Truss as a good example here (as well as Trump)
    - willis936 4y ago
      No, I really mean US primary elections are not democratic elections. They have no requirement to be and they are not. https://ballotpedia.org/Superdelegates_and_the_2020_Democratic_National_Convention https://ballotpedia.org/Superdelegates_and_the_2020_Democrat...
chadcmulligan 4y ago
Reminds me of a short story by Asimov - Franchise from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) (Spoilers!) In the future, the United States has converted to an "electronic democracy" where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held. The story centers around Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, the man chosen as "Voter of the Year" in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed. However, after "voting", he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens did not actually get to vote; even he himself did not vote for any candidate, law, or issue. The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I's correct prediction of the result of the U.S. presidential election in 1952.[1]
- origin_path 4y ago
  It's an interesting story in light of the way that the population is routinely forced to obey policies justified only via complex statistical models that require a computer to evaluate.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
“They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.” ― T.S. Eliot, The Rock
Gud 4y ago
The problem is how limited peoples power really is. Voting every four years for a “representative “ is not enough. Look for Swiss style direct democracy
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  A country like America has too many needs and responsibilities for direct democracy. Having full-time representatives handle these responsibilities gives me comfort; I don't want and can't afford the responsibility of learning the ins and outs of every aspect of American government. I don't have the time or energy for that, so if I were told to vote on all of those issues I'd either be voting at random or in the manner the media told me to. And where is the value of that? No, I want representatives to do most of it for me. Public referendums on some social policy issues are generally good, and I've voted in a few of those, but please do not make me responsible for all of it. Besides, handing nukes over to a plebiscite is a bone-chillingly awful idea. In the days following 9/11 I think we probably would have voted to start a nuclear war. The public, save the Dixie Chicks, were even more blood thirsty than the US Government.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > In the days following 9/11 I think we probably would have voted to start a nuclear war. The public, save the Dixie Chicks, were even more blood thirsty than the US Government. The US government used 9/11 as an excuse to invade two countries. Iraq was not involved in 9/11 at all, despite allegations, and it didn't have WMD either, despite allegations. And we invaded Afghanistan, but bin Laden was eventually found in Pakistan, our "ally". The US public might have voted to invade Saudi Arabia, which actually would have made more sense than Afghanistan or Iraq.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      I'm well aware. I also recall a shockingly large portion of the population thinking that the US government was being too restrained and that every Muslim country should have been nuked. If nothing else, I think the other nuclear powers would be a lot more nervous if the American public were in direct control of those nukes. It simply isn't safe. If we had been under a direct democracy at that time, the inter-personal pressure to conform would have been even greater. As it stands, the opinions of your fellow citizen are relatively low stakes because they aren't the ones actually calling the shots, and they know you aren't either. This indirect nature of representative democracy is conducive to political tolerance at the inter-personal level.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
Iirc, the electoral college and representatives were put in place because the [rich] founders knew the Demos can not be trusted to fairly govern itself. Election by lottery is not better because it's the same people with the same foibles. When the Greeks did sortition, it wasn't perfect either. Laws ended up favoring the richest landowners, and the richest landowners tended to have a higher representation (in the boule anyway). They tried various means to engineer the problems away, but they persisted. This is because it's nigh-impossible to prevent human beings from figuring out a way to exploit a system when they are committed to the task. Another way to have a superior political body is to make it superior and hold it to a standard. Rather than select average people, there should be basic requirements of intelligence, ethics, acts of good will, and the abandonment of luxuries, rewards and favors, in exchange for the support of the state. The state should support the education of the populous toward this end. In addition, the judgment over matters of serious concern should be presided over by experts. No decision of serious concern should be made without a meta-study, to root out bias and find the best possible solution. Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones. Let the noblest and wisest lead us in a structure designed for reason and fairness.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones. It sounds like you're describing Plato's philosopher kings. A key component of both sortition and Plato's Republic is that they're selecting leaders who aren't actively seeking power, in contrast to elections. (According to Plato, philosophers seek truth, not power, and must be forced to rule for the benefit of the community.)
  - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
    More like representative egalitarian scientist philosophers. They would not have total power, but they would have large influence. Think of an alternative governmental body, like the house and senate. You could even still have sortition as a separate body (a la Assembly). But this wise body would determine what was technically and logistically the best outcome, rather than purely moral. You could reject what the wise impartial person found through analysis, but it would be a difficult argument, because everyone would trust in impartiality and correctness, the same way we do in science. We could prefer what the whole body agreed upon, as it would be the most widely accepted scientific findings.
ericol 4y ago
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US. Gerrymandering, yo. This is _such_ a US centric view. Guys, you have way a worst problem than elections. You have a party strongly pursuing getting rid of democratic results altogether. Beyond the stated (That G word) the republican party is STRONGLY preparing the landscape to not recognize the results of the next election (Or the next one after that). I actually have a bet with a friend about when the last democratic election is going to happen, and my money is on this last midterms being the ones (Gotta reckon, I wasn't expecting Gen-Z, and I'm gladly surprised I might be wrong). Take for instance the last election in Brazil, where Lula beat Bolzonaro by the bare minimum: 51% to 49%. What would had been the results of such an election in the US? In 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, and _still_ Trump won the presidential race. In 2020, even thought Biden wan the popular vote by a large margin, the results were still down to a handful of votes [1] The problem, as I see it, is that you have a democratic system that allows for suppressing democracy. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-these-key-states-powered-biden-to-the-presidency https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-thes...
- account-5 4y ago
  I see you've been getting downvoted but no one is replying with why you might be wrong. From the outside-in (I don't live in the US either) what you've written certainly seems to be the case. You've literally got republican candidates (I think actually voted in now) saying unless they win the election was false/stolen. There is something very wrong with that.
  - ericol 4y ago
    Well, that's an odd event, isn't it? People _just_ don't like my comment, and they downvote it just because. But as you state, there's nobody countering my comment. All in all, interesting times. Obviously nobody wants a non-democratic US, but if that happens, I'm going to have the popcorn ready.
kkfx 4y ago
I suggest to rediscover from the Condorcet paradox to the classic renaissance Italian city-states structure to the classic Athens demagogues: any system can be abused. Then try finding an old book and a very old story: "The Science of Government Founded on Natural Law" by Clinton Roosevelt a relative of the much better known Franklin Delano and one of the scammers of the NY bank who became the FED years later [1] or the blatant explanation that all society develop a kind of hierarchy who is not at all democratic (nor meritocratic) who drive and (ab)use the others not differently than a shepherd with the flock. Sometimes the shepherd is soft and hidden enough that the flock do not revolt, sometimes it's not and get assaulted by the flock, sometimes it have to create a bit of theater, like wrestling, pushing the flock to think there are different ideas into play, they decide etc. The modern version of ancient Greeks theater where the orator start to plead a cause, convincing spectators who acclaim, than start to plead the exact opposite, in equally convincing manners. Those who understand applaud, those who not think he/she made fun of them and try to assault physically... [1] https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=carr&book=pawns&story=american https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=car... the scam is well described by one of the scammers letter, itemized at the end of the long page for those who are curious.
tardismechanic 4y ago
I first heard about Sortition on lovely QI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YNzGT0h6A64 https://youtube.com/watch?v=YNzGT0h6A64
imtringued 4y ago
How about both? People can vote for a party or sortition. Since all parties now have a common threat they are more likely to cooperate.

78 points by haakonhr 4y ago

I've held this view for a long time, since the day I realized the average politician was morally inferior to the average citizen.

kqr 4y ago
Yeah, it's such an obvious selection bias toward good optics at the expense of content.
loicd 4y ago
The problem is that averages are constructs of the mind. It is a fallacy to think that random citizens are average citizens. You can average numbers, you cannot average people.

benmmurphy 4y ago

Sortition is also much easier to protect from fraud than voting. Generating shared randomness in a way that can’t be rigged is a straight forward well studied problem. For example everyone who wants to take part generates a random value and publishes a public pre-commitment. Then all the random values are revealed, checked against the pre-commitments and xor’d to produce the final random value. All of this can be verified by a member of the public and any member of the public could take part. Issues around rigging the electoral roll are less of an issue than in voting because the person selected has to show up to do their job. It is far less effective to have dead people on the electoral roll because someone will need to impersonate the dead person if they are selected.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
These are brilliant ideas. But we do not yet live in a society that is technologically ready for them. Sure. we can create the protocols, logic and software. As a technical prospect it's within reach. All beautiful in theory. But can you imagine the corruption that would ensue?! Where would people store these tokens that represent literal political power? How would they verifiably redeem them? The problem is infrastructure. Civic cybersecurity is a great steaming turd. Digital literacy has declined as people surrender in the face of "convenience". Smartphones are wide open gaping holes, pre-pwned out of the box by vendor malware. Much of our electronic communication is designed and built in hostile nation states, served by a handful of greedy and untrustworthy big-tech monopolies, and overseen by governments who actively labour night and day to weaken our security. Until we live in an entirely different kind of technological culture, where people take more ownership of their technology (probably not within my own lifetime) I'll choose a piece of paper and a wooden box with a slot in it any day! That would be my informed choice as a computer scientist. Although, it is possible that with some clever mathematics and manufacturing technology (modern physical cash is an advanced technology) some kind of paper equivalent might be feasible. But first consider what happened in Russia when the people were issued share certificates in the ex-soviet economy and bartered them for food.
- user_named 4y ago
  What are you talking about? No software needed other than a random number generator. After election it's all about identity. We know how to handle identity for hundreds of years already. Thousands even.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > it's all about identity. We know how to handle identity for hundreds of years already. Well.. most developed countries do. But for America specifically, it has been a contentious matter.
ajjenkins 4y ago
Can you provide more detail on how this would actually work or somewhere I can read more about this? Like, if there are two people participating and one’s random number is 01 and the other’s is 11 (binary), and you XOR them you get 10. But that doesn’t match any of the participants’ numbers, so who would win? Or does the number of possible outputs need to exactly match the number of participants? If so, does that mean the number of participants needs to be an exact power of 2?
- dllthomas 4y ago
  Participants generating numbers are only helping ensure the result is random. You collectively pick a number, and then use that to select a person from a predetermined(!) list (presumably picking a very large number mod the size of the list to get an index in the list).
- benmmurphy 4y ago
  You can also just add all the random numbers chosen between 0 and n-1 and take the result modulo n. So just normal modular arithmetic no xor.

valeg 4y ago

It may work in local elections but nation wide elections require the popular mandate. Humans like to believe that they have a stake in the system, however small.

defrost 4y ago
Easy enough hybrid fix; those people that are judged to perform well in direct sortition local area politics who also wish to further that work are in the pool for a combination draw|election for state roles .. and then tier upwards to national. The general public get to know their national candidates first at the local and then state level, and those candidates are judged as "better than a head of lettuce" by their peers in office. The political wing of government is essentially (ideally) just about debating policy - it's the civil service, military, and judicial wings that get tasked with making things happen (subject to checks and balances).
- valeg 4y ago
  Yes, bottom up. Risks are localised. It may work very well for local judges and regulatory bodies.
dudul 4y ago
Monarchies have worked for longer than democracies have been around. People had no stakes in the system and were fine with it for thousands of years.
- valeg 4y ago
  The Mandate of Heaven as a concept expired long ago. Only DPRK uses it for legitimacy rn.

BMc2020 4y ago

The revelation came while Bouricius was working on a housing committee. “The committee members were an outgoing and garrulous bunch,” he observed. “Shy wallflowers almost never become legislators.” More disturbing, he noted how his fellow politicians—all of whom owned their homes—tended to legislate in favor of landlords and against tenants. “I saw that the experiences and beliefs of legislators shape legislation far more than facts,” he said. “After that, I frequently commented that any 150 Vermonters pulled from the phone book would be more representative than the elected House membership.”

chiefalchemist 4y ago
We elected the electable, not necessarily those most appropriate for the role. Furthermore, in the majority of cases, we are only allowed to elect those who are pre-approved by The Red Party or The Blue Party. Both parties have biases. Worse they, like the examples mentioned, tend to leans towards self-serving (the party) and/or serving their own mwmbers (i.e., don't offer the best possible representation). It's like cliques in high school all over again. What I'd like to see is simple. Add "None of the above" to every race. Let The People fully express themselves. Let them give the parties direct feedback about the products they're marketing. Yes, that's kind of what not voting it. Unfortunately, the fact is, the parties don't recognize that as a possible "Crap products" votes. They can phantom that. NotA would stuff it right in their face.
- 0dayz 4y ago
  I can see this might be true in highly corrupt countries. I think it's easy to preach this idea that political parties only serve itself and don't care about anything else. In truth it's something that is more or less required to be effective since voting is only 1 part of it (someone had to write the legislation and do investigations). Of course the party cares what their members think otherwise what would be the point of being a member of said political party. And lastly it needs to be stressed if a political party or candidate don't listen to their voters then (if it's a fair election) they won't be re-elected.
- sfgd 4y ago

pjc50 4y ago

I'd like to see sortition tried somewhere, but not as a full replacement for elections. Maybe it would be a good replacement for the House of Lords.

andrekandre 4y ago
i wouldn't mind sortition as long as there was a way to at least "unelect" the person in the case that someone really turned out bad for whatever reason
- pjc50 4y ago
  Note that very few places have this for elected representatives during their term. The UK recently got one: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04594/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04... - MPs can be recalled if they are jailed. Quite significant as during the Northern Ireland civil war several MPs were political prisoners.
dudul 4y ago
Worked in Athens for a few centuries.

andrewstuart 4y ago

I like the idea of expendable democratic power. It works something like this: Each voter gets say (for example) 1,000 votes, which they allocate to whichever parties they want at election time. The number of votes a party gets become its “currency”. Any political party can put forward legislation to become law. They back their legislation with some number of their votes/currency. Other parties can defeat legislation by spending a greater number of their votes to stop it. When a party has spent all its votes/currency, it must wait till the next election to get more.

sokoloff 4y ago
As proposed, that seems sure to result in a series of unattractive-to-one-side legislation backed by 1 vote requiring the other side to use 2 votes to stop. You could 2:1 amplify the power of your votes by creating a bullshit generator and the side with the most voluminous BS would end up with the only votes left.
0dayz 4y ago
It might sound good on paper but I think in practice you would have various ways of exploiting the system or the system breaks down (what if say the left party has spent all its points fighting against tax cuts so now it doesn't have enough points to increase welfare and Healthcare programs or vice versa with the right party).
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  That’s not a disadvantage, that’s a feature. That the way it’s meant to work. It’s precisely intended that if a party wants to spend all its its capital opposing, then it does that at the cost of being able to advance its own policies.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If it costs me two votes to oppose your legislation, but only one vote to introduce superseding legislation (which could supersede multiple of your legislative items), this seems like a much less stable system than today. Chaos in law-making is probably worse than the disaster of two-party first-past-the-post.

account-5 4y ago

Sounds like demarchy to me.

atemerev 4y ago

Oh come on. We already have a working system: direct democracy. An entire well-developed country works like this: Switzerland (and quite successfully). I absolutely do not understand why it is not adopted elsewhere (except politicians egos, of course, and this is quite a strong force to overcome).

ramraj07 4y ago
Switzerland is never a good example. A homogenous small nation that’s immensely gifted resource wise, is rich by any measure of that word, and is immune and protected from damn near anything, can make any system work. Most nations are not like that.
- julienreszka 4y ago
  >Switzerland >Homogenous There are four language regions, how is it homogenous.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    There are more languages spoken in individual provinces in india. Language is not a source of heterogeneity. Pretty much all heterogeneity in the world was invented and entrenched due to colonial rule, so you can hopefully understand what I mean by not heterogenous.
- atemerev 4y ago
  “Immensely gifted resource-wise”? In what world? Also, it speaks four languages, and more than a quarter of its population are immigrants — not what I’d call “homogeneous”. Switzerland is an exception (and a rich one) _because_ it is a direct democracy, I’d argue.
somenameforme 4y ago
Switzerland's been exceptional for many decades. They managed to remain genuinely neutral during both World Wars even as the world melted down right outside their borders, remain one of the few governments not dominated by the copyright cartel (for instance personal use copyright infringement is legal in Switzerland), and of course their direct democracy system. They do their own system, and they do it in a very social and capable fashion. But how long will this last? By contrast over there was an interesting recent poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454449 The majority of Americans now support new stimulus checks to combat inflation. I'm increasingly persuaded by Plato's 5 Regime's view. In a nutshell, each system has its own virtue which taken to extremes becomes its vice and leads to its downfall and transition into the next system. The 5 regimes being Aristocracy, Timocracy (an implicitly anti-materialist government driven by systems of honor - think Spartans or Klingons - the Wiki page on this topic is simply wrong), Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny.

mberning 4y ago

At this point a philosopher king sounds way better to me.

duxup 4y ago

I wonder how hard is it to pay off random people? Also who writes what could be complex legislation for complex issues?

wanderingbort 4y ago
One of the good things about crypto and blockchain is that I can say with great confidence that it is both easy and inexpensive. For reference see one of the biggest NFT drops this year and the pleas they made to not buy KYC’d addresses: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a-kycd-wallet-for-the-bored-apes-teams-otherside-mint/ https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a...
- duxup 4y ago
  Crypto’s best use case!
kqr 4y ago
Do we need complex legislation for complex issues? There was a discussion here on HN a few days ago where some people argued that maybe it's better to legislate just for the simpler, common cases, and exceptions will always have to be exceptions and judged case by case in court.
- duxup 4y ago
  Yes how a law is written is important.
tjpnz 4y ago
>Also who writes what could be complex legislation for complex issues? The same people who currently write it - policy analysts and lawyers.

mintaka5 4y ago

make it like jury duty. randomly select taxpayers to represent people for short terms. i'd prefer a random concerned citizen making decisions for a month over 2/4 years of a corruptible do-nothing elitist. keep the representation constantly rotating. more people is more ideas, more consensus, and closer to reality for most of us <---

onos 4y ago
This is what they did at times in ancient Athens. One positive was that the average citizen was much more aware of the concerns of the city than would occur if only a select few were running things.
- pasc1878 4y ago
  But not every one in Athens was a citizen. There were many slaves etc. This is election as per 18th century Britain elections by the propertied classes.
geomark 4y ago
Have you ever served on a jury? My three times were eye opening. Very few of my fellow jurors had the slightest ability to perform critical thinking. Most paid no attention to the jury instructions and simply voted their biases. I can't imagine how bad they would be as civil leaders.
- kqr 4y ago
  I don't think anyone is saying these people would be competent. Just on average more competent than a career politician. If you're baffled by the average jury, you should see what the politicians are like!
- lapcat 4y ago
  There are a number of problems with juries: 1. They're too small. 2. They're not totally random. The attorneys are allowed to eliminate members of the pool. 3. The jury doesn't actually run the trial. Nor do they run the police department, for that matter. The trial is run by the judge and the attorneys. The jury is mostly passive listeners. They're spoon-fed info at the trial and not even allowed to know all the facts. 4. Jury terms are too short. Contrary to what the previous commenter suggested, it's not ideal to have short terms. Citizen legislators should probably serve 1 or 2 year times. They need time to learn how to do the job. They probably need preparation before they take the job.

szundi 4y ago

If this system is established, the corruption will come in pretty fast into this one too. Even easier because there is just so few people to influence in short time.

lapcat 4y ago
> Even easier because there is just so few people to influence in short time. What do you mean by so few people? The size of the legislatures wouldn't necessarily change, so it's the same number of people at any given time, and since there's no reelection, it ends up being a larger number of people overall. And I would say it's harder to corrupt people you don't have relationship with. Whereas long-serving politicians develop relationships with lobbyists over the years. The biggest reduction of corruption is the elimination of campaign contributions, which is essentially legalized bribery. This leaves only illegal bribery, which can be prosecuted. You could audit randomly selected legislators for years after they leave office to make sure they're not taking bribes.
- kqr 4y ago
  It's also hard to build relationships with future members of the legislature when there's a pool of 10 million to choose from, rather than the 5000 or so career politicians we have in the current system.
  - headsoup 4y ago
    I'm sure there are many piles of ready lobby cash that will happily build new relationships in no time at all
- ajjenkins 4y ago
  One reason corruption might increase with sortition is that it would be much cheaper to successfully bribe a representative. Most politicians are rich so it’s very expensive to make a bribe worthwhile to them. But if people with less money are in power, they might be swayed by smaller bribes. Also, they don’t have as much to lose if they’re caught accepting a bribe. If a career politician is caught accepting a bribe, their career as a politician is over. But if a mechanic is caught accepting a bribe during their 2 year stint as a representative, they would suffer minimal reputational damage and could just go back to being a mechanic. You also mentioned that you could prevent this with harsh penalties and long term audits, but I think it would be pretty easy to circumvent an audit. Like, if I wanted to bribe someone elected by sortition, I would just offer them free stuff instead of money so it’s harder to trace. Like free hotel stays or prepaid gift cards. I could imagine apolitical people treating a sortition win like winning the lottery and expecting to get money out of it. And just auctioning their vote off to the highest bidder. With all that said though, there would be a lot of advantages to sortition so the risk of corruption and bribery might still be worth it and would still probably be better than our current system.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

We need councils running everything, democratically elected councils whose members are instantly recallable upon a vote. That will ensure they are responsive to the needs of people.

antihero 4y ago
Surely if they were instantly recallable it would incentive extremely short term thinking as opposed to long term strategic plans which may involve some difficulty in the short term?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sfgd 4y ago

Ancient India has several instances where the next ruler was selected by the royal elephant. Of course, it was not meant to be random, as the elephant would pick a righteous person capable of steering the kingdom at that time.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
Look into the elections for the Doge of Venice: (via https://www.rangevoting.org/VenHist.html https://www.rangevoting.org/VenHist.html) > Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]: > - Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process; > - Reduce them to 9 by random processes; > - The 9 name 40 nominees; > - The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process; > - the 12 name 25 nominees; > - Reduce them to 9 by random processes; > - The 9 name 45 nominees; > - Reduce them to 11 by random processes; > - The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be age≥40 years); > - The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting! > - This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice – they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto.

captainmuon 4y ago

I think it is nonsense to try to fix politics by making it even more arbitrary. The biggest problem in the US is the electorial system that leads to two parties with each close to 50%. Elections are so close that it is essentially meaningless. Is a party with 50.1% really more legitimized to rule than the one with 49.9%? Step one to fix democracy would be to get rid of the winner-takes-all system. Not only would this make more than two parties viable. You would also fix that most of the country's vote doesn't contribute at all (since people live in "safe" counties where they have little influence on the outcome.) Then, when elections are won with clear margins, yes, you could abolish elections, and replace them by representative polls! The benefit is that polls are much cheaper, you can do them much more frequently, and the people can change bad policy quicker. It might be controversial, but I like that you can also apply "reweighting" to polls to make them more representative.

shkkmo 4y ago
The point of sortition is to apply the benefits of representative polling but while allowing the people polled to take the time to deeply research and understand the issue. I don't see anything that is arbitrary about the process.
dudul 4y ago
"Even more arbitrary"? The current system is not arbitrary at all.
permo-w 4y ago
proportional representation rarely leads to elections won with clear margins
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Did you mean to point to that as a problem? Because all this means is that minorities can not be stumbled upon.
  - origin_path 4y ago

brianolson 4y ago

They're suggesting 'government by jury', but what I expect it will turn out to be is 'government by the permanent bureaucracy'. The staffers who are there all the time will make suggestions to the current jury that is making decisions, and those decisions will probably 90% go with what the staffers suggest.

CPLX 4y ago
In their defense this is our current system, instead our lottery is confined to a smaller group of rich megalomaniacs.
- trowawee 4y ago
  Right, the current system is 40% government via bureaucracy, 50% government via lobbyists/industry (including the parts of the bureaucracy that have been fully captured by industry), and 10% "the kind of freaks who run for and win public office" (who I think we should treat with reflexive suspicion on principle, even when I nominally agree with them). It's not at all clear to me that bureaucrats + lottery system would be worse, and it seems likely it'd be better.

julienreszka 4y ago

Anybody's who gives this idea more than a minute of thought quickly finds out this is utter nonsense.

shkkmo 4y ago
Since I've spent over a decade this thinking about this, and think it clearly the best way to solve the problem of election, perhaps you'd care to enlighten me on why it seems like nonsense?
- julienreszka 4y ago
  Democracy by lottery is a very ancient idea, one that was tried in Athens and quickly abandoned because it resulted in disastrous consequences for the city. The consequences were so bad that the idea was never seriously considered again until now. Among the consequences: - The lot was usually determined by birth, so it tended to perpetuate privilege. - People who didn't want to serve often found ways to get out of it, so the people who ended up serving were often the ones who didn't want to. - It resulted in a lot of incompetent people in positions of power. - And perhaps worst of all, it tended to breed a culture of resentment and envy, since the people who were chosen by lot often felt that they didn't deserve it and the people who weren't chosen often felt that they did. The idea that democracy by lottery is a good idea is simply absurd.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    > Democracy by lottery is a very ancient idea, one that was tried in Athens Yes, the article covers this. > and quickly abandoned because it resulted in disastrous consequences for the city. You're gonna need a citation for this. > The consequences were so bad that the idea was never seriously considered again until now. This is not factually accurate. The article mentions that sortition was seriously considered by some founders. It has also been used in various forms throughout the world. Several of those examples are discussed throughout this thread.
- loicd 4y ago
  I am not OP, but it seems to me that there is an obvious problem with it. If you select a truly random set of citizens to rule a country, there are no guarantees that you will get a representative sample of the citizenry. That's simply not how statistics work. Without any further selection, you will eventually (and sooner than you would expect) put terrible or incompetent people in power. Now, if the randomly selected citizens must go through a selection process or be moderated by experts, then the actual power is in the selection process and moderation, and there is nothing democratic about it. For what it is worth, I am French, and my country recently made a sortition experiment[1] that I found less than convincing. This was in response to the yellow vest movement. I did not feel represented by that 'citizens convention'. I do not know what part of their propositions come from them, and what part come from the experts advising them. Some of their propositions (like putting a more stringent speed limit on highways) were not implemented because, ironically, they were impopular. The whole thing felt like a failed experiment to me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...

jongjong 4y ago

I think democracy by lottery may be a good idea provided that the outcome of the lottery can be trusted. It could be done through a cryptographically-verifiable (e.g. blockchain-based) random number generator. The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician. I don't think it would be a problem if politicians ended up more naive as a result. Just having well-meaning politicians would be a significant step up. That said, I think we should rely less on government intervention in the economy. We need to fix the monetary system to provide a level playing field, then once that's done, we need to trim back regulations. The way to solve the corporate monopolization problem is through increased competition. The government's primary role should be to promote maximum decentralization. The government should not concern itself with equality of outcomes; it should only concern itself with equality of opportunities. It should not think about efficiency; it should trust the free market to take care of that.

dxdm 4y ago
> The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician. This claim needs some back up. I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician". What separates them is the opportunity, and having a system in place that works to keep people honest. I'm watching my fellow citizens litter and help themselves to "free stuff", and the behavior of freshly minted "politicians" who get voted in by disgruntled voters of formerly fringe parties (or formerly fringe wings of established parties). I'd like to hear how you propose to keep the "average citizen" principled in the face of increased access to opportunity and power.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician" That's silly. The politician is completing in a race that they are trying to win. The citizen is just trying to live, and takes time out of their life to vote and pick someone who might (might!) have a shot at fixing some of the things that annoy them without breaking some of the things that actually work. The politician is goal-oriented, the citizen is existence-oriented.

choeger 4y ago

While random choice has some merit, it ignores some basic requirements of legislation: Legislation is interfacing with the executive and judicial branches (and you definitely don't want to randomly select your judges and governors). This interface works through legalese and other techniques. So someone with a certain experience or training in these techniques will be able to write better laws. Also, legislation necessarily works through specialization and work in committees. That's another thing people can learn to do better. That's where political parties are actually useful. Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses. Also, people have many different identies at the same time but but cannot represent them all equally well, anyways. So some aspects of society wouldn't be represented at all during a legislative period because everyone is supposed to represent their own identities, not someone else's. So unless we create a legislative assembly that's so large that it borders on direct democracy, I don't see the benefit. And in that case, let's just have direct democracy. If necessary with a legal requirement to vote.

lapcat 4y ago
> Legislation is interfacing with the executive and judicial branches Why do you assume there would be 3 branches of government like the current system? As the article discusses, the founders of the US divided the government in order to dilute democracy and maintain the power of the economic elite.
shkkmo 4y ago
> So someone with a certain experience or training in these techniques will be able to write better laws. Also, legislation necessarily works through specialization and work in committees. Lawmakers today rarely write the legislation they vote on. They have support staff and experts who assist them in drafting legislation. Nothing prevents providing similar infrastructure to representatives selected by sortition rather than elections. > Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses. Um... What? Minorities would unequivocally be better represented under sortition than under elections. Poor people would be better represented, women would be better represented, young people would be better represented. The primary group that would loser it's massive overrepresentation is the old rich white lawyers who dominate our current house and senate. Your argument here makes no sense.

christkv 4y ago

This is what I’ve always supported because it kills political parties dead and their corrupting influence.

at_a_remove 4y ago

How swiftly the meme has changed from "If we don't win, democracy dies!" to "Since we didn't win, let's get rid of elections!" See also "Our candidate didn't win because of the electoral college, so let's get rid of that" and "Let's make people vote on Brexit again, since they voted wrong the last time." These people are almost charmingly shameless. Rather than do better, they just want to put the fix in for the next time.

shkkmo 4y ago
Supporters of sortition have been pushing it a lot longer than the current election cycle. Rather than dismissing "these people", perhaps you would benefit from engaging intellectually with the idea. If you did, you would probably find that the supporters of this idea are very different from what you are imagining.
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  It's the timing. Why, suddenly, this article here! What a coinkidink, hunh? I'm quite familiar with the concept and have had to implement non-FPtP voting schemes. However, it is a trap to engage with the disingenuous.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    The article was clearly timed to coincide with the US elections. That's why it was published the day before the election! Please don't try to shut down discussions with poorly constructed conspiracy theories.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      "The article was clearly timed to coincide with the US elections. That's why it was published the day before the election!" That's the same "conspiracy theory" he's talking about..
      - 4y ago

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I quite like sortition and citizens assemblies, but it's amazing how much pushback there is to even minor moves towards further democracy (proportional representation etc.) and how much energy is spent undermining the limited democracy that exists so I feel uncomfortable with the headline.

nemo44x 4y ago

Yeah let’s appoint leadership that on day 1 asks “what should we do?”. What could go wrong there? Love it or hate it but a minority of better organized elites will always run the show in every organization from a local bake sale to government.

zzzeek 4y ago

It pains me greatly to not be sarcastic about this but I cannot help but think this article would not be making it to the front page of HN a day after the Democrats clinched the Senate majority, had the midterm elections favored the Republican party as everyone expected.

lapcat 4y ago
The article was published 6 days ago, before the election. You're reading way too much into the timing.
- zzzeek 4y ago
  it arrived on hacker news front page today, is what I am referring towards. Here's an idea, let's try first having PG give YCombinator funding to startups based on a random lottery, rather than actually picking them. When that's successful, then we can talk.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > it arrived on hacker news front page today, is what I am referring towards. It arrived on the front page today because it was submitted today, and because it's an interesting and relevant article, regardless of the election result. You'll have to ask the submitter haakonhr about the timing, but 6 days is a reasonable amount of time to discover, read, and submit an article from the Boston Review.

rplst8 4y ago

If the candidates that are put up in the general aren't what people want, why did they win the primary?

willis936 4y ago
Because primaries are not democratic. Political parties are not democratic entities.
- pasc1878 4y ago
  That depends they are. However the issue is that the party members are a small proportion of the general public. Thus a small group is enough to win the vote in the party, This tends in a two party system to make the winner more extreme and less likely to be liked by the general public. See Liz Truss as a good example here (as well as Trump)
  - willis936 4y ago
    No, I really mean US primary elections are not democratic elections. They have no requirement to be and they are not. https://ballotpedia.org/Superdelegates_and_the_2020_Democratic_National_Convention https://ballotpedia.org/Superdelegates_and_the_2020_Democrat...

chadcmulligan 4y ago

Reminds me of a short story by Asimov - Franchise from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) (Spoilers!) In the future, the United States has converted to an "electronic democracy" where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held. The story centers around Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, the man chosen as "Voter of the Year" in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed. However, after "voting", he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens did not actually get to vote; even he himself did not vote for any candidate, law, or issue. The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I's correct prediction of the result of the U.S. presidential election in 1952.[1]

origin_path 4y ago
It's an interesting story in light of the way that the population is routinely forced to obey policies justified only via complex statistical models that require a computer to evaluate.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

“They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.” ― T.S. Eliot, The Rock

Gud 4y ago

The problem is how limited peoples power really is. Voting every four years for a “representative “ is not enough. Look for Swiss style direct democracy

MichaelCollins 4y ago
A country like America has too many needs and responsibilities for direct democracy. Having full-time representatives handle these responsibilities gives me comfort; I don't want and can't afford the responsibility of learning the ins and outs of every aspect of American government. I don't have the time or energy for that, so if I were told to vote on all of those issues I'd either be voting at random or in the manner the media told me to. And where is the value of that? No, I want representatives to do most of it for me. Public referendums on some social policy issues are generally good, and I've voted in a few of those, but please do not make me responsible for all of it. Besides, handing nukes over to a plebiscite is a bone-chillingly awful idea. In the days following 9/11 I think we probably would have voted to start a nuclear war. The public, save the Dixie Chicks, were even more blood thirsty than the US Government.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > In the days following 9/11 I think we probably would have voted to start a nuclear war. The public, save the Dixie Chicks, were even more blood thirsty than the US Government. The US government used 9/11 as an excuse to invade two countries. Iraq was not involved in 9/11 at all, despite allegations, and it didn't have WMD either, despite allegations. And we invaded Afghanistan, but bin Laden was eventually found in Pakistan, our "ally". The US public might have voted to invade Saudi Arabia, which actually would have made more sense than Afghanistan or Iraq.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    I'm well aware. I also recall a shockingly large portion of the population thinking that the US government was being too restrained and that every Muslim country should have been nuked. If nothing else, I think the other nuclear powers would be a lot more nervous if the American public were in direct control of those nukes. It simply isn't safe. If we had been under a direct democracy at that time, the inter-personal pressure to conform would have been even greater. As it stands, the opinions of your fellow citizen are relatively low stakes because they aren't the ones actually calling the shots, and they know you aren't either. This indirect nature of representative democracy is conducive to political tolerance at the inter-personal level.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

Iirc, the electoral college and representatives were put in place because the [rich] founders knew the Demos can not be trusted to fairly govern itself. Election by lottery is not better because it's the same people with the same foibles. When the Greeks did sortition, it wasn't perfect either. Laws ended up favoring the richest landowners, and the richest landowners tended to have a higher representation (in the boule anyway). They tried various means to engineer the problems away, but they persisted. This is because it's nigh-impossible to prevent human beings from figuring out a way to exploit a system when they are committed to the task. Another way to have a superior political body is to make it superior and hold it to a standard. Rather than select average people, there should be basic requirements of intelligence, ethics, acts of good will, and the abandonment of luxuries, rewards and favors, in exchange for the support of the state. The state should support the education of the populous toward this end. In addition, the judgment over matters of serious concern should be presided over by experts. No decision of serious concern should be made without a meta-study, to root out bias and find the best possible solution. Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones. Let the noblest and wisest lead us in a structure designed for reason and fairness.

lapcat 4y ago
> Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones. It sounds like you're describing Plato's philosopher kings. A key component of both sortition and Plato's Republic is that they're selecting leaders who aren't actively seeking power, in contrast to elections. (According to Plato, philosophers seek truth, not power, and must be forced to rule for the benefit of the community.)
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  More like representative egalitarian scientist philosophers. They would not have total power, but they would have large influence. Think of an alternative governmental body, like the house and senate. You could even still have sortition as a separate body (a la Assembly). But this wise body would determine what was technically and logistically the best outcome, rather than purely moral. You could reject what the wise impartial person found through analysis, but it would be a difficult argument, because everyone would trust in impartiality and correctness, the same way we do in science. We could prefer what the whole body agreed upon, as it would be the most widely accepted scientific findings.

ericol 4y ago

Disclaimer: I don't live in the US. Gerrymandering, yo. This is _such_ a US centric view. Guys, you have way a worst problem than elections. You have a party strongly pursuing getting rid of democratic results altogether. Beyond the stated (That G word) the republican party is STRONGLY preparing the landscape to not recognize the results of the next election (Or the next one after that). I actually have a bet with a friend about when the last democratic election is going to happen, and my money is on this last midterms being the ones (Gotta reckon, I wasn't expecting Gen-Z, and I'm gladly surprised I might be wrong). Take for instance the last election in Brazil, where Lula beat Bolzonaro by the bare minimum: 51% to 49%. What would had been the results of such an election in the US? In 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, and _still_ Trump won the presidential race. In 2020, even thought Biden wan the popular vote by a large margin, the results were still down to a handful of votes [1] The problem, as I see it, is that you have a democratic system that allows for suppressing democracy. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-these-key-states-powered-biden-to-the-presidency https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-thes...

account-5 4y ago
I see you've been getting downvoted but no one is replying with why you might be wrong. From the outside-in (I don't live in the US either) what you've written certainly seems to be the case. You've literally got republican candidates (I think actually voted in now) saying unless they win the election was false/stolen. There is something very wrong with that.
- ericol 4y ago
  Well, that's an odd event, isn't it? People _just_ don't like my comment, and they downvote it just because. But as you state, there's nobody countering my comment. All in all, interesting times. Obviously nobody wants a non-democratic US, but if that happens, I'm going to have the popcorn ready.

kkfx 4y ago

I suggest to rediscover from the Condorcet paradox to the classic renaissance Italian city-states structure to the classic Athens demagogues: any system can be abused. Then try finding an old book and a very old story: "The Science of Government Founded on Natural Law" by Clinton Roosevelt a relative of the much better known Franklin Delano and one of the scammers of the NY bank who became the FED years later [1] or the blatant explanation that all society develop a kind of hierarchy who is not at all democratic (nor meritocratic) who drive and (ab)use the others not differently than a shepherd with the flock. Sometimes the shepherd is soft and hidden enough that the flock do not revolt, sometimes it's not and get assaulted by the flock, sometimes it have to create a bit of theater, like wrestling, pushing the flock to think there are different ideas into play, they decide etc. The modern version of ancient Greeks theater where the orator start to plead a cause, convincing spectators who acclaim, than start to plead the exact opposite, in equally convincing manners. Those who understand applaud, those who not think he/she made fun of them and try to assault physically... [1] https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=carr&book=pawns&story=american https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=car... the scam is well described by one of the scammers letter, itemized at the end of the long page for those who are curious.

tardismechanic 4y ago

I first heard about Sortition on lovely QI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YNzGT0h6A64 https://youtube.com/watch?v=YNzGT0h6A64

imtringued 4y ago

How about both? People can vote for a party or sortition. Since all parties now have a common threat they are more likely to cooperate.