Elections are flawed -it’s time to start choosing our representatives by lottery | Hacker News Reader

Elections are flawed -it’s time to start choosing our representatives by lottery

aeon.co

50 pointshamiltonians38 comments

"As soon as the entire adult population had been educated to the limits of its intellectual ability (and sometimes, alas, beyond) genuine democracy became possible... Thereafter, selecting a head of state was relatively unimportant. Once it was universally accepted that anyone who deliberately aimed at the job should be automatically disqualified, almost any system would serve equally well, and a lottery was the simplest procedure."

- Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

> As soon as the entire adult population had been educated to the limits of its intellectual ability

Not the case.

> Thereafter, selecting a head of state was relatively unimportant

Economists giving medical advice because they have five minutes to spare.

Even when the first statement will come to mean that all the population will have all of the degrees, there will still be differences in education, traits, talent, and especially experience, that will make the individuals subjectable to ranking in multiple dimensions.

Edit: indicate to me a Country or a local administration in which the population, in late 2021, is such that randomized appointment to administration could make little difference to proper selection, and I will move there and be forever grateful.

To the comments: many here seem to accept as given that nobody running for office deserves the privilege, but I don't think that's true at all. In fact, I think governing is hard work, and expecting people who aren't interested to do it well is naive. I want to be a principal engineer—does that make me a bad engineer because true engineers care nothing for esteem, or a good engineer because I sit around reading and thinking about software all the time?

To the article: "Modern policy is too complex for there to be meaningful electoral accountability. Electoral capture is too easy and too important for powerful interests. So, what’s the alternative? Get rid of elections. Use lotteries to select political officials."

...What? "Elections imposes insufficient accountability on representatives"...so let's replace it with a system that imposes zero accountability on representatives whatsoever? That's an alternative, but not a solution.

> ...so let's replace it with a system that imposes zero accountability on representatives whatsoever? That's an alternative, but not a solution.

I think the point is that accountability isn't as necessary. A random person will running the show after the next lottery, and whatever bribes and deals you have are probably off the table.

I applaud to this newfound maxim, "an alternative is not a solution (per se)". Very good synthesis.

The sinister side of these times is in the roots that made such notion shaky to some. Something related to the fading of the idea of "doing it properly".

Edit: in the example of the idea of "extending the right to vote to infant children", which I mentioned in a parallel post as part of the trend, there is an important image: one of the proponents, during an interview (in the recent podcast of Jeremy Paxman), asked why, replied along the lines of «To shake this stagnant system».

There is the point: _do not shake it_: improve it, fix it, debug it, re-engineer it; do not hit it with a hammer hoping it improves by winning determinism through the sheer force of luck, do not attempt electroconvulsive therapy, do not stick an ice pick in that thalamus in the idea that random sabotage can be even remotely comparable with the clever blueprints of a neural organism - it cannot bring an improvement (which should go without saying, yet was actual practice).

Elections are flawed in many real systems, but we also have extensive empirical research on real election systems and know how to mitigate those flaws, if we are sufficiently motivated to make changes. (The big changes are to adopt voting systems that support greater proportionality and number of competitive parties; if you want to do this without losing individual accountability and manageability, you uses something like STV in small multimember districts, which is both proportional and candidate-centered (rather than party-list-oriented).

This is the political science equivalent of abstract architecture astronauting with no real-world grounding, and if you think that's bad for a software system, its far worse when the system is the government.

We have n

STV doesn't fix the problem that the people who seek election and are capable of winning often are the last people who should govern. It just gives more proportional representation.

Exactly - where we are the people running are either

a) totally bought (big business, unions etc). b) very strong opinions

Makes for weird politics in the end.

Your average person has some pretty strong, weird opinions, too. I'm all for governance by lottery in theory, but I don't have a rosy outlook on the outcome if we went straight there without a few generations of near-universally effective public education

>Makes for weird politics in the end.

- When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. -- Hunter S. Thompson

The trend continues where there remains almost no chance of getting someone with actual leadership ability into important leadership positions.

Real leadership is so rare and had been needed more badly than ever for so long, people have been thoroughly conditioned en masse to accept the poorest of substitutes. Especially since the system has been insidiously gamed so that recognized non-leaders could have a shot to begin with, and it has only gotten worse & worse from there.

When a real leader comes along they bear no resemblance to what has now become accepted as a familiar party representative, whose only advantage today is a pop culture following with no higher objective than to join the bandwagon and over-run every alternative voice.

Nobody even recognizes a real leader any more if it's not someone having a formidable machine constantly hustling to manipulate popular opinion in hyperbolic ways.

And when you've got that, you don't need a person of worthwhile substance to be the center of attention, you can move the target and get a block of voters to prefer only non-leaders as electable candidates.

Well every random citizen in good standing might not actually be leadership material themself, but the odds are infinitely better without a doubt now.

> STV doesn't fix the problem that the people who seek election and are capable of winning often are the last people who should govern.

It can to a significant extent by eliminating the lesser of two weasels problem, substantially altering the effective methods of campaigning and the kinds of people who can win.

In any case, “just gives more proportional representation", isn’t a small thing. Proportionality produced by the electoral system is, when looked at across established modern democracies, a very good predictor of how happy the electorate is with the policies of their government and government in general. There's a reason its usually people deeply embedded and versed in a particular deeply non-proportional system (usually the US one) but who haven't invested much energy in understanding comparative electoral systems that either come out with wacky ideas like “let’s get rid of elections entirely” or who express deep-but-inevitably-disappointed faith in some rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic scheme like rearranging something about how districts are drawn with no other changes to the US system on the other; while on seems super radical and the other seems super incrementalist, they are both symptoms of knowing one particularly broken system.of elections and thinking the space of meaningful options is limited to variation within that system or outside of elections entirely.

This argument is based on a deep misunderstanding of what democracy is for. It is not a system for making the best decisions. It is a system for getting everyone to accept the decisions that have been made without resorting to violence by giving everyone the feeling that they have had their say.

With what we have right now it seems that very few get a say and most people feel that way.

The idea that one could be fooled into some «feeling» is quite offensive, and the idea that one should is quite defeatist (and immoral).

In fact, not only the «system for making the best decisions» is probably what one demands in the social contract: as an actively sought goal, it is also one of the best possible ways to bring the public into a grounded, founded contentment about the said decisions.

Who said anything about fooling? The feeling of having had one's say could be legitimate, though reasonable people can and do disagree about this.

The whole idea of "the best decisions" for a society is non-sensical because there is no universally agreed upon quality metric. Different people want different things.

Well, to orient someone's behaviour by giving them a "feeling" which does not overlap with reality, I call manipulation. But you probably did not mean it in these terms and I misread your expression. (That an expectation of contentment through "well but you had your say with voting" can be cheap is stressed by the very existence of a debate based on the doubtful status of voting systems in use.)

I used the expression «best decisions» quoting you, but if you replaced that with "better decisions", or "best possible decisions given the circumstances", you have a different scenario, where the accent is on the attempt towards optimization as a goal. That goal, of efficiency, optimization, "doing things properly" etc. is explicitly demanded by many participants in the social contract. That different metrics and dimensions are there is exactly the game of "politics" (in terms of preferences). That different levels of possible quality exist in administration is entailed by the different quality of the members that may compose the administration: there is a difference between workers per job, even allowing ranking, so it is valid to say that there exist configurations in administration that are better than others, and it is valid to say that there can exist systems that achieve the goal of better configurations (instances, organigrams) of administrative bodies better than others. If, to give a very simple example, there may exist better snapshots than "Pierce, Buchanan, A. Johnson", than there may exist selection system that minimize this occurrences and maximize the better ones - otherwise, one would fall in a relativism to which I do not subscribe.

To define such selection system, I would surely go in the direction opposite to randomness (as a general principle - though it does work as a specific part of some procedures).

This is such a defeatist piece. Sure let's just all give up and flip a coin to survive in the world, our minds can be tossed aside, nothing is good or bad everything just IS

EDIT: just as I was finishing the article, I think to myself Aeon is communist, google that and find these wonderful articles [1] [2]

[1] https://aeon.co/essays/the-merits-of-taking-an-anti-anti-com...

[2] https://aeon.co/essays/communism-failed-what-about-the-ideal...

submitter too https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hamiltonians

Don't be gross.

I don't think "coin flip" is a fair description of the proposal.

It's more of an application of statistical sampling to direct democracy to remove the tremendous overhead involved in requiring everyone to vote on every issue.

A sufficiently large, randomly selected legislative body should closely reflect the eligible population, probably much more closely than an elected body would.

Your comment is incredibly reductive and relies on both the “attack the messenger” and “straw man” fallacies. The author did not say anything even close to what you’re accusing them of saying. I’m not convinced you actually read anything past the headline.

Lottery is far from lacking flaws either, if you're worried about lobbying, think about what happens when your representatives are all untrained...

A split model would be interesting, though. What if, for example, the US Senate continued to be elected or went back to being appointed by the states and the House were filled by sortition?

Our representatives are all untrained.

Lobbying is worse in the US because House reps are elected every two years, so they're in permanent campaign for donations mode. They have to raise money for their next election in such a short time from lobbyists and big local donors(e.g. like car dealers in Texas who got Tesla banned from selling cars on its own by lobbying and donating to state level politicians). Senators have longer terms but they also need to raise a lot more money since they represent the entire state and their opposition is not sitting idle.

The honest reps won't last long because their opponents will raise more money by promising to do the donors' bidding. Same with state level elections.

If you eliminate the need for expensive election and re-election campaigning, you can reduce the impact of lobbying and also populist legislation for the sake of appeasing voters of certain kinds even if the law is not in the interest of the general population. This is the reason that Supreme Court judges are appointed for life. They can decide court cases based on conscience and don't have to worry about being re-appointed by the political executive and Senate.

This is called a “jury” and participating is called “jury duty”. We mostly do it for trials, but there’s no reason we couldn’t do it for eg redistricting as well and a few other niches.

Totally agree with this. Appointing a jury is via a lottery. Most justice systems around the world see this as a via way of approaching the problem. Sure there are flaws, but few laid at the door of juries themselves.

I think it would be great to move away from the thinly veiled popularity contests that is modern democracy.

So faulty it would take too much time to debunk it systematically.

E.g., "lottocracy may reduce corruption": in a rational framework, it is more direct to tackle the issues of politics as a career.

Now, what really makes one an enemy of some strands of current """cultural""" airs (where "cultivation" does not really fit into the concept), is the decadent abandonment to the lower, in a climate of senseless complicity to destruction - replacing constructive solutions with defeatist ones is a signal of such climate.

We have centuries of practice of sophisticated voting systems, very specifically, and instruments more refined than they have ever been for the construction of the theoretical part - modelling, simulation etc.

And one hears of lottocracy (not the first time) and "giving the rights to vote to children aged six". Unfortunately, "selected" is better than "random" by definition, and infant children have unmyelinated, immature brains holding scarce experience and very few intellectual keys.

And it seems that some think it a good use of time to provoke instead of seriously propose.

For a primer about at-least-slightly sophisticated voting systems, one text is: George G. Szpiro, "Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present", Princeton University Press (2010)

So I like this idea a lot, but I feel like there's a fatal flaw in it. Maybe someone here sees a solution.

Say I have a population of 80 Indigo people and 20 Chartreuse people.

In our current indirect, bipartisan, representative democracy, voters tend to split pretty evenly. It isn't too hard for the candidate to secure 40 Indigo votes each. They have to then build an 11 vote advantage by either smearing their opponent, or by actually catering to Chartreuse needs. There's an antipattern that can emerge where the tactic becomes "scare the bejeebus out of Indigos until they hate and fear Chartreuses enough to vote for you," and that's pretty terrible.

In a naïve lottery system, 80 percent of the time you get an Indigo representative, who may be completely oblivious to problems facing the Chartreuse community, or may even benefit from those problems. And that's it. Minorities just get shoved out to the fringe and truly disenfranchised.

The current system is busted, and I think the lottery has potential, but it would be hard to implement it fairly.

In the US, at a Federal level, it feels like a party needs both wings of congress & the executive to get stuff done. With some exceptional periods where ruling by executive degree has been enough. Who we vote for feels semi-immaterial given that getting anything done feels so impossible. The party I vote for will have been "in control" for let's say half my life, but trying to get even the most meager change passed seems to have required an act of god or a budget reconciliation bill. This is jacked up, just farcically bad.

The change appears to have happened within my life too. I hear politics was never a pretty game, but since Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert & the Hastert Rule, there's been a seeming inability & general unwillingness for Congress to even have to bother listening to or voting on anything other than what the ruling party decrees.

In 1904, G.K. Chesterton wrote a fun novel about 1984 London where the king was chosen by lottery called The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I picked it up after the 2016 election since that seemed like such an anomaly. There are some interesting explorations of human nature, and of course you can draw parallels to modern times without too much stretching. However, I don’t think a lottery is a serious answer.

Yes! Sortition! It was good enough for ancient Athens, it's good enough for us. (For years, one of my own personal causes I'll advocate to anyone who will listen)

Ranked choice voting would be nice too, but the beauty of sortition is that we could completely eliminate not only political parties, but the entire profession of being a politician!

Choice of people by casting lots is all the way through the Bible too. But if I suggest it to the modern church it is as if I am proposing witchcraft. Perhaps leaving the outcome to God (as was the intention) is seen as being a bit too risky.

The old democracy system was built on old hardwares, election shouldn't really matter nowadays. There is technology to have everyone involved in every decision to be made, you don't need to choose a guy to do it for you. Have a system to do referendum online for every bill drafted by the government!

Perhaps, but it comes down to the old question of whether democracy should be a majority rule. If you had a system to do referendum online, you'd promote populism, and you could easily pass a vote like "free pizza for everyone on Mondays". Most people don't even have the basic knowledge of topics such as economics, so they don't know what is feasible and what the consequences of decisions may be. The idea of choosing guys to do it for you is that they can analyze the proposals and filter out the unreasonable ones, in theory at least.

Also, doing online referendums comes with the discrimination issue, skewing heavily towards young smartphone users who have internet access, discriminating against elderly and people living in rural areas with limited internet access.

Hey whatever it takes to get free pizzas on Mondays sign me up. You just made me pro-lotto.

Decisors should have intellectual maturity - knowledge, experience, insight, intelligence - about the matter of decision. The instrument of referendum exclude that. The population is supposed to determine collectively the orientation (shifting the weighs in the compromises), not to determine the solutions technically.

Saying that elections are flawed is putting it lightly...

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