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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps we can save democracy by replacing the voting mechanism by placing people in groups of 10, and letting them reach consensus before making a vote.

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That was how the US Senate originally operated. You would elect your state legislature (where your vote is much less diluted than at the federal level) and they would elect your Senator.

Early 20th century populism took that away. It also meant that the states now have no representation in the federal legislature, which led to an almost immediate federal takeover of basically everything.

That amendment really screwed democracy in the US. Not only does it remove room for debate, but it has IMHO been a major factoring in lessoning voter interest in the state legislature. This has far reaching consequences, such as making it harder to make new amendments and checks against gerrymandering.

This is also the idea behind the electorial college as well.

Iowa has caucuses rather than primaries, and from what I hear from my family, that's essentially how the Democratic party caucuses work in Des Moines, Iowa. Rather than filing in and filling out a ballot, my father describes the process as going into a room, forming groups around candidates, and then trying to convince the uncommitted to support your candidate. It always sounded like a rip-roaring good time; now it's interesting to learn that this process might produce better results.

Policy juries are an under-used decision procedure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_jury

You could also have one body of the legislature (the US Senate? The House of Lords?) selected by Sortition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

That would not be the same situation at all. In the case of general knowledge questions, obviously the small groups will do better because people who are uncertain and would have voted randomly will instead listen to whomever is confident. And everyone works together to pool knowledge.

In political voting the problem is not a lack of information- everyone has a strong opinion about everything already and putting them in small groups would just result in unproductive bickering.

Perhaps everyone has a strong opinion of headline candidates, like senators, presidents, governors and such. However, I think small group concensus would really improve the voting for everything else: state constitutional amendments, bonds, school board and other local administrative positions.

It seems like that would reward misinformation. You're saying that people could argue in their small group for a particular position that's not widely-known, but in most of those cases nobody will be there to argue against them, and they can say whatever they want. It would be better if people familiar with the issue voted and people unfamiliar with the issue left that blank on the ballot, instead of making it a lottery of whose supporters end up unopposed more often in small groups.

Or groups of 11, so if they can't reach consensus there is at least a tie breaking mechanism.

When I volunteered to run a caucus in a Nevada primary election, decks of playing cards were distributed for the purpose of breaking any ties. Luckily, we didn't reach that resort in my precinct.

That’s how voting in China works.

There’s a hierarchical electoral system where those at the bottom of the group votes for the next position up.

It's also the model used/proposed in a lot of socialist systems, such as Democratic confederalism, as practiced by the Kurds in Rojava

Various forms of this type of decision-making already exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting

I mean, this is essentially how the House of Representatives works.

Those 10 ppl still have to "care".

If one will say "lets vote for X" and the rest will say "yea whatever".

They did not reach any consensus as the discussion did not really happen.

Only way to make democracy work is to let ppl who care reach consensus.

https://outlookzen.com/2014/01/21/democracy-by-jury/

You mean like trial by jury. I like it.

Trial by jury gets one set of 10 (12, whatever), whereas the consensus model described would have n sets of 10.

I seriously doubt the wisdom of a crowd goes up when the total crowd size shrinks to 10. I suspect it plummets.

This does call into question the notion of a multiple-jury trial (maybe videoconferenced in, where the individual juries do not interact with each other). Based on this study's findings, it would appear that juries might get their verdicts wrong less frequently with this system.

Imagine if the first OJ trial or Trayvon Martin trial had been before multiple juries; would society have been better off if the results were less dependent on the biases of juries small enough to be cherry-picked?

To summarize the findings of this research article for you:

  Wisdom of the Crowd vs one person = good  

  Wisdom of the crowd vs tiny groups 4+ = bad

In this case a jury is not really about everyone in it being wise, it’s about there being a better chance that an informed decision will take place due to those in the group discussing the decision before voting rather than just voting for whatever CNN recommends. With the current system you just have people doing whatever they are going to do without having to explain it to anyone else.

So, a fine-grained representative democracy.

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