7 ms·

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 amoun

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.

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.