14 ms·

The technical term is sortition. And it is my pet unorthodox political position. The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lot

• gameman144 1y ago
  This may show that I'm biased, but the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me. There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking. Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
  • TimorousBestie 1y ago
    > Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind. Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.
    • Supermancho 1y ago
      Was hubris and greed that set that limit. Can't be self-important if you're one amongst many.
  • connicpu 1y ago
    Regardless of how the average person may feel about it on a surface level, I think it's absolutely critical that congress has so many lawyers elected. These people write laws, we need people who actually understand the way law works doing that job.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      In practice it creates a very strong incentive to write laws in a way that reinforces the "rule of lawyers", creating an exclusionary positive feedback loop.
    • f1shy 1y ago
      That is good for the form, OTOH the content (objet of the law, which is almost more important, one can argue) is more often that not, not related to the field where lawyers are experts (from sociology to engineering, through economics and medicine) that is typically handled by expert’s consultants, comities, etc. So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?
    • namlem 1y ago
      Elected representatives do not write laws. Their legislative aides write the laws. While some state governments have highly professionalized legislative aides, in the federal government, such positions are typically poorly paid stepping stone jobs filled by people in their late 20s/early 30s who have little domain expertise.
      • burningChrome 1y ago
        Not true. The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills. USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law. Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council. https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
    • vdqtp3 1y ago
      Our elected reps neither write nor even read the laws that are passed. Laws are written by lobbyists and aides, if we're lucky with direction from the representatives.
    • pintxo 1y ago
      Given that legalese is still commonly prone to interpretation. I‘d rather have more Mathematics and Computer science people to ensure proper logic in the texts ;-)
      • GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
        might as well throw in some "red team" types to propose potential loopholes/grey areas.
    • almatabata 1y ago
      Aren't most of those lawyers the select few that can afford to go into politics?
    • Ekaros 1y ago
      Maybe it is time to change how laws work if you need trained experts to understand them. Seems extremely harmful to everyone else who is not lawyer.
      • unethical_ban 1y ago
        Any adversarial system that exists for a long time has such issues. Go pull up the rulebook for any professional sport. Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.
  • woooooo 1y ago
    > There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking. We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did. It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.
    • esafak 1y ago
      But the status quo is considered anomalous by most of the world, so I would not use it as a benchmark.
      • rolandog 1y ago
        I'm all in for some continuous improvement experiments for democracy: - modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields. The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.
        • pstuart 1y ago
          "Simple" remedies for American democracy: * Campaign Finance Reform * End Citizens United * Ranked choice voting (or a variant of same). Technically totally feasible, just impossible due to the current owners.
          • zimpenfish 1y ago
            Also * Expand the Supreme Court
            • 1y ago
  • yesfitz 1y ago
    That's what bicameral legislatures[1] were meant to address. Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works. In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
    • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
      Ideally, the upper house is gradually stripped of its powers, as it's undemocratic by design. IIRC it's actually somewhat rare to have a bicameral legislature where both houses have roughly symmetrical powers.
      • delichon 1y ago
        "Undemocratic by design" applies to the whole Constitution, since everything in it requires supermajorities to change. A legislature is undemocratic in that it restricts voting to representatives. Due process is another constraint on democracy. This is to say that "undemocratic" is not necessarily a bug, since pure democracy is rule by the whim of the mob.
      • yesfitz 1y ago
        Is that ideal for a bicameral legislature's ability to mitigate the risk of populist takeover? Or a step on the way to the ideal of direct democracy?
  • namlem 1y ago
    There are many proposed models for how to incorporate sortition into governance. Some examples: - A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse) - policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect - election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one - multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power. It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).
  • keiferski 1y ago
    I think it could work well if you added two things: 1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving. 2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.
    • pintxo 1y ago
      This training thingy sounds sensible. But who controls the contents of the training? That body will have quite some power.
      • keiferski 1y ago
        Could just make it as a public-based majority referendum type thing, and keep it extremely simple. I don't think it would need to be very complicated. You just want to filter out the truly insane people.
        • sampl3username 1y ago
          The actually dangerous people are not the obviously insane, but the machiavellian dark triad types. Those will pass your test.
          • keiferski 1y ago
            I think the current political system probably selects more for that type of person than my proposed randomized one, in which they are far less likely to be chosen vs. an average well-adjusted person.
    • pintxo 1y ago
      I don’t see any need for that. There are enough weirdos in politics today that the weirdo rate might even go down when selecting people at random.
    • 1y ago
  • skrtskrt 1y ago
    Have you ever really paid attention to the members of the US House of Representatives? There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.
    • vkou 1y ago
      That's due to politics being a team sport, and everyone, including the voters, understanding that it's a team sport. Getting your team control of a branch of government is way more important than having a 'good' rep in your district, because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways. If you couldn't get someone you wanted in the primaries, you just have to hold your nose, close your eyes, lie back, and vote for whomever made it through. Whether this results in long term problems is a bit of an academic question, given that every election in the past decade is one where you either get to vote for the status quo, or an insane cult of personality.
      • jamie_ca 1y ago
        Alberta has been struggling with this lately, the province on the whole keeps voting in 90% or more Conservative MPs, but Canada on the whole puts the Liberal party in charge. And so Albertans get frustrated that they don't feel like they've got any voice in things. Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...
        • vkou 1y ago
          1. Canadian elections outside of Alberta have a different dynamic because they are a three/four horse race - and in certain election cycles, they have a lot of strategic voting (this last one was a good example of it). 2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them. There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either. Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    But you can't evaluate it in a vacuum. It needs to be compared to the current state of affairs, and to other realistic alternatives. Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?
    • mprovost 1y ago
      Two relevant quotes from writers who could not be more different: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” - William F Buckley Jr “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
  • munificent 1y ago
    > the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me. Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
    • Supermancho 1y ago
      > Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you? Those are screened. Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.
      • Edman274 1y ago
        okay, well that guy won an election so clearly it's possible even without sortition. If people are picked at random then the likelihood of getting some wacko is lower rather than higher, because wackos are more highly motivated to try to act on their wackadoo policies and because of the way voting is implemented, that wouldn't really be a problem for them because it no longer appears to be disqualification for a politician to be crazy, and the crazy ones are the ones who run. On the flip side, the actual rate of totally crazy people across the entire population is likely to be smaller than you expect and random selection would represent the underlying rate of wackos in the public. If it turns out that the rate of wackos is so high that like, 51 percent of your legislature is hearing voices in their head and living like Diogenes, then representative democracy isn't going to help you either.
    • gameman144 1y ago
      > Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you? Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail. For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.
  • toss1 1y ago
    I've long been in favor of sortition, but with (as suggested in the article) a set of qualifying criteria. Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote. There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.
    • Terr_ 1y ago
      What you're proposing would be swiftly corrupted by the people in power deciding what qualifies as "educated enough" or "security clearance". Accept anyone from Jebus University with its miraculous 100% graduation rate, exclude anyone with a record of "Disrespecting an Officer", and the pool is quickly skewed, a reinforcing feedback-loop in favor of the groups doing the skewing.
      • toss1 1y ago
        True, you cannot start sortition as a good means of re-distributing power in an already centralized system. It is a method to help maintain a balanced distributon of power, not created it when already gone awry. In democracies, the branches of govt, legislative, executive, & judicial, and the institutions of society including the press, academia, industry, finance, sport, religion, etc. are all independent and serve to distribute and balance power. In autocracies, all of those are corrupted and/or coerced to serve the whims of the executive. So, of course, an already-powerful centralized executive would be able to corrupt it as you describe. But it seems much more difficult to make it happen in a well-balanced system, particularly when some have the responsibility to ensure ongoing fairness. Do you have a better solution?
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    The US system is biased towards rural areas and swing states because of the electoral college. Randomness would average out to the will of the people. Like unbiased path tracing, you know?
  • marcosdumay 1y ago
    Yep, I can get behind sortition between qualified candidates. I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok. For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.
  • jhanschoo 1y ago
    The idea in this that appeals to me is that the institutions cannot afford to have poorly-educated citizens. But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.
  • barry-cotter 1y ago
    They don’t make law. It’s purely advisory. The two main purposes are for politicians to try to avoid responsibility for making decisions and consensus laundering. The secretariat has been really great at picking facilitators that will get the right recommendations through though they put their thumb on the scales too hard with the last referendums to amend the constitution and two proposals were defeated.
• bongodongobob 1y ago
  As long as they can pass some basic education and civics tests, sure.
  • sokoloff 1y ago
    I agree, but I’m not convinced that 100% of current Reps could pass a civics test.
• resource_waste 1y ago
  Scary stuff. As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy. If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam. We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
  • k__ 1y ago
    "As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy" Sad thing is, that it's impossible.
    • f1shy 1y ago
      Typically we settle in moneytocracy…
      • kelseyfrog 1y ago
        We do have the persistent cultural myth that money = merit[1][2], so it's not entirely different. 1. Acres of Diamonds. Russell Conwell. 1900. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdiamonds.htm https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdia... 2. The Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie. 1889. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth
        • f1shy 1y ago
          MHO: the myth is broader: that everybody gets more or less what he deserves. I have heard many times, justification of why person X is poor, pointing he is lazy, wastes money in alcohol, etc. but I have seen poor people, and is (typically) not the case. The problem is, when people is poor, there are no pleasures, often only alcohol is a way out. Only people who were there or had vey near people in that situation understand what is like to be poor… OTOH, people think that rich people made it by hard working. I’m not saying there is no correlation whatsoever. But there is much less than most think, and great amounts of luck playing a bigger role, including, but not limited to, where you were born, family, contacts, etc.
• LorenPechtel 1y ago
  Yikes, no! Just look at the initiatives that get on the ballot. Most have serious failings of understanding how the system works.
  • meatmanek 1y ago
    Ballot propositions have a number of shortcomings that sortition-based legislatures won't necessarily fall into: - Most people filling out their ballots aren't spending very much time on each prop -- they'll typically either vote based on their gut reaction to the title of the prop, follow a voter guide from an advocacy group they want to align with, or just vote based on whose advertising campaign was most influential. - Ballot props, at least in CA, are pretty much directly pay-to-play. There's a price tag for getting a prop onto the ballot, because signature gathering companies charge per signature. (Though at least in SF, conservative ballot props cost more per signature because there aren't as many conservatives to sign. This implies there's _some_ correlation between the cost and the popularity of a particular proposition.) - Ballot props are both high-latency and low-bandwidth. Coupled with the fact that they often cannot be overridden except by another ballot prop, and we're basically stuck with any flaw in the bill that passes (unless it's egregious enough that someone's willing to foot the bill for another round of signature gathering and advertising, which will cost about as much as it did for the original bill.) - Ballot props don't go through several rounds of amendment before being passed, nor do they really have any debate; there's just a single round of "should this be on the ballot" followed by a single round of "should this be law". This means flawed bills are more likely to end up on the ballot. Because of the high latency mentioned above, voters are often stuck with a choice between a bad solution and no solution to whatever problem the ballot prop is trying to solve. If we assume it works sorta like jury duty, a sortition-based legislator would have their schedule forcibly cleared, so they'd have all day to think about laws. (Presumably for some sufficiently-long term, like 6mo to 2yr.) Campaign finance-based lobbying (i.e. legalized bribery) would cease to exist, though you'd definitely still have paid lobbyists -- people who are good at influencing the members of the legislature. Bribery would almost certainly happen, but at least it would be illegal so hopefully less common than it is now. The legislature could still have committees and debates and proposed amendments, allowing for refinement of bills before they make it to a vote.
• k__ 1y ago
  Haha, mine too. It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something. Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus. That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency
  • bilbo0s 1y ago
    If it's truly random, it should already be 50-52% female. If it comes out 10% female every sortition cohort, you know some funny business is going on.
    • k__ 1y ago
      Isn't this a question of how many people you select?
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • bilbo0s 1y ago
        Sure. My point is that so is the percentage of males in any sortition cohort. Therefore, a consistent female census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts, would be as unlikely as a consistent male census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts. In other words, having one sortition cohort result in 10% males would not be suspicious. Having every sortition cohort result in 10% males would be suspicious in the extreme. So much so that we should start looking for whoever is "putting their finger on the scale" so to speak.
    • breuleux 1y ago
      If the sample size is low, it could come out at 10% purely at random, but that is still likely to undermine confidence in the system (in the immediate). Pragmatically, I think it makes sense to have quotas for a few protected classes, to maximize perception of fairness.
• goda90 1y ago
  I saw someone on HN suggest the Supreme Court should just be randomly selected sets of federal judges on a case by case basis. Less opportunity for bribery and political games.
• colmmacc 1y ago
  Ireland has a Citizens Assembly, which is selected by sortition. Ordinary citizens take time out of their lives to participate when assemblies are formed to examine issues of the day. The assembly receives expert and political testimony and evidence, and then votes and makes recommendations that often lead to country-wide referendums. The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.
  • zeristor 1y ago
    Apart from being caught up in all the corporate tax swindels.
    • ahartmetz 1y ago
      If you mean all the European branches of US companies in Ireland, these are only bad for people outside of Ireland. The highly democratic Switzerland has a similar "corruption to the detriment of other countries" thing going on.
  • barry-cotter 1y ago
    > Ireland has a Citizens Assembly, which is selected by sortition. Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.” > The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales. > The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
• wrp 1y ago
  Any discussion of sortition in politics needs at least a mention of Harrison Bergeron.
• hammock 1y ago
  In politics, sure. The way the headline is framed you can draw a similar parallel to genetic competition as well though. There are elements of both biodiversity and randomness required for successful genetic evolution
• marcusverus 1y ago
  With a little back-of-the-envelope math, this would mean that congress would contain: > 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped) > 52 members with IQs under 85 > 217 members at or under an IQ of 100 > 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115 Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent. If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.
  • breuleux 1y ago
    If you have fifty bright and highly competent people, I'm skeptical that adding fifty idiots is going to make much of a difference. Most idiots will accept meritocratic authority if they can be convinced that their needs are taken into account (which they should). Some will obstruct, but probably not enough to significantly derail anything, and the good-faith idiots will bring information and perspectives that wouldn't be considered if they weren't there, so they aren't exactly useless. In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.
    • marcusverus 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • tptacek 1y ago
        The ditch? You're alive in the greatest year in the entirety of human history to be alive.
      • aspenmayer 1y ago
        [flagged]
• baxtr 1y ago
  So no elections?
  • specialist 1y ago
    That's the question, right? Citizens' assembly makes policy. But then who implements it? I (currently) believe that we'd still need executives, still need some kind of balance of powers. So I'm okay w/ electing mayors, sheriffs, governors, etc. Perhaps even multi-seat roles; something between a council and a mayor. Assuming, of course, we use approval voting for execs, PR for councils.
• kjkjadksj 1y ago
  I’m worried that sort of thing ends up like Jury Duty where anyone actually qualified to think deeply about the case is doing everything in their power specifically to not be selected and waste their time. The pay is shockingly low and it can be a huge disrupter if you run your own small business.
  • meatmanek 1y ago
    IMO you'd want this to pay pretty well, like 95th percentile income, to help ensure that most people would actually _want_ to serve.
    • fsckboy 1y ago
      95th%ile income, given to people with randomly distributed incomes? first law they pass: "we get to keep this job, we need to get rid of sortition, it'll never work!"
      • treyd 1y ago
        This is a strawman. Since this body would be organized by the constitution, it can trivially eliminate that risk by just setting a duration of their term, which they would not be able to overturn.
        • fsckboy 1y ago
          same type of strawman as inequitable distribution of wealth being a problem, or highest achieving members of society especially those born with advantages do not make good stewards of government
    • xboxnolifes 1y ago
      Just give it the same income as current congress representatives. That's already a 90th percentile income.
• vannevar 1y ago
  It's an interesting idea, I've kicked something similar around with politically-minded friends for years. I don't know that a completely random group is the answer, but a hybrid approach might solve some critical problems: - A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator. - The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature. We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
• pasquinelli 1y ago
  i've always thought a jury should be used instead of a supreme court. if the law people had their chance and couldn't settle an issue, kick it to the people.
• eqvinox 1y ago
  My pet unorthodox position is also sortition, with an added (possibly transitionary) twist: hold elections and do it for non-voters, for a non-voter share of seats. You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages. This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad. Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.
  • NL807 1y ago
    Compulsory voting kinda solves some of these problems.
• ClayShentrup 1y ago
  sortition is a more general concept.
• jjtheblunt 1y ago
  > The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery. that sounds like jury duty selection, in the US anyway, and juries are famously dysfunctional at times, with a single member ignoring the rules and trial and just voting politically.
  • DennisP 1y ago
    That would be less of a problem in a legislature, where you don't need unanimity and there aren't any comparable rules about how you are supposed to vote.
    • jjtheblunt 1y ago
      good point!
  • subscribed 1y ago
    Do members have right to vote according to their conscience? If yes - why is that a problem? They stick to the overarching rule, and you should argue the rules must be amended. If not - that's a huge problem IMO and can be summarised with "why pretend jury has any say If they must not stray from the way the case is presented and defended (knowing very well how awful public defense is and how dishonest sometimes police and prosecution can be)" and not replace it with just a judge?
  • deleted 1y ago
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• naasking 1y ago
  Not fully replaced, but some percentage should be reserved for sortition. This can increase efficiency and break deadlocks, like two party rule.
• thinkharderdev 1y ago
  I think in practice this would just lead to a class of staffers who actually ran everything.
• arlort 1y ago
  This could realistically incur the same issue as term limits, where you end up moving power and know how away from visible (no matter how flawed) and (somewhat) accountable elected official to the staff and interest groups that are not subject to such limits I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes
• a_imho 1y ago
  I would argue that sortition is Democracy. From a purely technical point of view to be anti-sortition is to be anti-democracy, which is fine I guess but begs a lot of questions. From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process. While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.
• logicchains 1y ago
  Sortion is the term for selecting people for office randomly, Demarchy is the term for a system of government in which people are selected that way.