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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that greatly can influence the results.

With elections, there are constraints which make deviations from the preference of the electorate less likely the greater the salience of the issue is. Sortition distributes the issues on which the decisionmakers deviate from the represented population randomly, which means that salience of the issue does not affect the likelihood of deviation between the decisionmakers and the represented population.

This is a significant weakness in sortition compared to elections, that needs to be weighed against whatever advantages are identified for it.

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For a particularly dramatic example of this, read G.K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_.

In the book, England, late in a long and uneventful history, is governed by lot; a randomly-chosen individual is crowned King and given dictatorial powers. Eventually, the lot falls on a bored nihilist with a fondness for 16th-century uniforms, and within twenty years London is a patchwork of feuding principalities with antiquated weapons, beautiful heraldry, and a whole lot of innocent people dead.

This book confirms what you're saying: it's not very likely that a barking madman will be randomly chosen as dictator, but it only has to happen once.

(The strangest thing about it is that Chesterton saw the most troublesome belligerents, who at one point threaten to use a water tower as a sort of late-Victorian atomic bomb, as the good guys; their willingness to use violence brought beauty and dignity back to a pacific, indolent world. This book was written before Chesterton became Catholic, and its bored nihilism reflects his own feelings at the time; I strongly suspect that it had an influence on the development of fascism, given that Mussolini was a fan of Chesterton's.)

Edit to say that your point is interesting and one I hadn't really thought about. This make elections a referendum on the most salient topics, which I guess makes sense. I still think that in elections there are a lot of other factors that influence decisions and given certain voting preferences there are a lot of arbitrary factors that influence the results, more so that in sortition, whose main drawback, as I see it is how little we know about how it would work in practice.

Original message: But even for salient issues there are a lot of random factors in elections. Suppose there is a issue so important that everybody cares and votes based only on that issue. Suppose there are only two candidate, and they have a clear and opposing position on this issue so that things are very simple for voters.

Suppose candidate A gets 50,999,897 votes Suppose candidate B gets 50,456,002 votes

B can still win, as happened with Bush, depending on the voting system. This is just an example and of course depends on the specific voting system. The real point being that for sortition you have simple statistical guarantees, always, independently from salience.

Why not use both? Select a random sample of candidates and then hold an election. By adjusting the number of candidates you can have the process act more like pure sortition (low number) or pure election (high number).

That's a grand idea, but because most of the random lot would be unknowns, I think it would quickly devolve into electing the outlier -- either the one person we do know, or the one who had the superficial traits that the electorate favors most. We'd choose on the basis of celebrity and beauty, since those skills needed for leadership (e.g. good ideas, fairness, capable at delegation, and courage) are too subtle to be detected by a popularity contest, 95% of which takes place only on TV.

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