The Case for Abolishing Elections
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
The biggest problem in the US is the electorial system that leads to two parties with each close to 50%. Elections are so close that it is essentially meaningless. Is a party with 50.1% really more legitimized to rule than the one with 49.9%?
Step one to fix democracy would be to get rid of the winner-takes-all system. Not only would this make more than two parties viable. You would also fix that most of the country's vote doesn't contribute at all (since people live in "safe" counties where they have little influence on the outcome.)
Then, when elections are won with clear margins, yes, you could abolish elections, and replace them by representative polls! The benefit is that polls are much cheaper, you can do them much more frequently, and the people can change bad policy quicker. It might be controversial, but I like that you can also apply "reweighting" to polls to make them more representative.
The smaller parties have little to lose playing "my way or the highway" during negotiations, so end up getting at least some top items from their program pushed through. This has led to some rather poor laws and regulations in recent times.
That said, while I've thought about this vs the US two-party model a bit, I think I prefer what we got over here.
The US also has that, the different is that its less visible, and the minor factions have more power because:
(1) the minor factions are esconced within major parties, so there is no public discussions about coalitions, and
(2) because of #1, and because such arrangements are stickier, the major factions have less choice as to which minor faction to make a majority with, making them more at the mercy of the minor and extreme factions theybare bound to.
This does not mean forcing you to vote for anyone in particular, but it does mean forcing people to turn up and indicate some type of preference - even if that preference is "no one here".
Mandatory voting is common elsewhere [1], and the sell is simple: voting is compulsory for all citizens unless a valid reason is provided (which isn't a high bar for most valid reasons) or a nominal fine is imposed (in Australia - $20 [2]). This fine isn't significant in anyway, it just has to exist because it does two things: asks people how much they seriously don't want to participate in the free thing which ensures their freedom, (2) forces the AEC to look into the matter - they have to try and collect the fine, and in turn ask why someone didn't vote, which means incidents are investigated, and (3) if a lot of people are getting fined the suddenly it's going to very much become a national issue as people make a fuss about it.
It's irrelevant to talk about anything else while substantial parts of the the American voting eligible public do not vote, and no one is responsible for investigating why and ensuring that it was a personal decision and not a problem of lack of access, time or intimidation. You can't run a democracy when the one defining characteristic of a democracy is handled so flippantly.
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joi...
I'm not saying it's right, but it is what would happen.
But is there some reason to think that it would tend to improve the decision making quality of the population? That when compulsary voters are included, there would be better choices made on laws and representatives? I can't think of one. On the contrary it would seem to compel the participation of a lot more people who don't care.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Still regret it.
All political parties are filled with petty power seekers. From the article: "Though once a member of Australia’s Green Party, inspired by its commitment to grassroots democracy, he grew disenchanted with party politics." "he made his way into the activist circles of Occupy Wall Street after college but likewise became disillusioned." One of the biggest advantages of random selection is that you select people who are not actively seeking power.
Another inherent problem with party politics is that if there are election campaigns that cost money, there's corruption built into the system.
Sure, but with more than two viable parties, you have more incentive to run on a positive message, because driving people away from one particular opponent or demobilizing their base, especially in a way that alienates your voters but to a lesser extent, is not as effective a campaign tactic when its not 1-on-1.
First, that the group represented is as small as practically possible, so small numbers of people, small cultural subgroups, and a limited social distance between the elected official and the constituents.
Second, that the rules governing a group are as local as possible, large disagreements should be unusual, and ideally lead to splits in region. Issues on a state or federal level should be limited to interactions with other states or nations; weather or not you want to live in a group with legal abortion for example should be determined at the the smallest size that can make that decision; probably city by city, what people in other cities think should have no bearing.
Unfortunately the nature of government is to centralize and accumulate powers, things that were once the sole preview of a town or county are now federal issues. It seems impossible find a "fair" voting method, to reconcile how to weight two distant strangers opinion on what should be a local matter.
This is not in any way hidden.
In fact, they were often progressive steps away from even worse systems.
you still end up with what amounts to an uninformed electorate. You've figured out how to count an uninformed opinion in a better way. And maybe eliminated number 2 and some of 1 from being a complete problem, but unpopular controversial people will still manage to drive the conversation.
Both of these are particularly incentivized in systems with FPTP and the duopoly it tends towards. So, electoral rules do matter here.
The result is that even in homogenous societies that have shared history and values have trouble reaching consensus.
Moreover even with the best intentions and actions one cannot predict unintended consequences or future events that are unaddressed by the past.
That’s true but there is also a very real constitutional problem here. My country has a system close to the US and sees the same issues.
A good constitution should foster a viable ecosystem of parties each representing the interests of a relatively homogenous group then force these parties to build coalitions through negotiations. That garanties than people feel that their opinions are represented, that there are a plurality of opinions in debates and the necessity to govern with people with different interests mean a consensus has to be reached and nothing to extreme should happen.
A system fostering two parties necessarily means the party will be caricatures. It’s obvious that both houses people with widely different opinions. It’s a travesty of democracy if you think about it.
In the State elections law I have read, this is set up to happen like this.
For example, Illinois election law specifically mentions Ds and Rs.
Election law in other States often sets major/minor party donation limits and ballot name ordering based on things like prior off-year Governor results. This uses math to keep the "minor" party allowable donations low.
What State election law are you in and does it mention major/minor party?
This election law setup to move toward two parties is obviously known to your State legislators who team together to prevent fixing it. And the people eat it up and argue about side issues!
I don't see anything that is arbitrary about the process.
You can't prevent people in the US from ganging up, but there is no reason elections should be required to promote parties or ballots print party next to candidates. Some offices (most judicial races for instance) do not use party affiliation.
George Washington was right when he warned us about political parties.
Because all this means is that minorities can not be stumbled upon.
The idea that FPTP must yield a two party system isn't right anyway. The UK uses FPTP and has quite a few different parties that routinely challenge the big two in major and impactful ways (SNP, Lib Dems, UKIP, Reform etc).
no
Not creating artificially exaggerated mandates is a feature, not a bug.
Would you rather see politicians be elected with only a plurality of the votes?
Some would see this (having to build coalitions) as a feature.
(As a Canadian I can see pros and cons given our system.)
My country uses a single transferable vote system - pretty much no representatives are elected with a majority of their constituency's vote - instead each constituency elects multiple representatives (3-5), and you vote with a ranked choice of all of the people running in your constituency. No one gets a majority of first preferences because there's no concept of a "wasted" vote if you vote for someone on the fringe - your vote will eventually end up transferred to your favourite candidate that can feasibly be elected.
The result is a legislature that is extremely representative of the population at large with a wide gamut of parties. Our politics is obviously still as dysfunctional as anywhere, but I don't think any of it can be chalked up to the electoral system.
See Trump for example:
48% vote and a 1 in 2 turnout:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_president...
or Boris Johnsons landslide with 42% of a 67% turnout:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_...
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) (Spoilers!)
In the future, the United States has converted to an "electronic democracy" where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.
The story centers around Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, the man chosen as "Voter of the Year" in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed.
However, after "voting", he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens did not actually get to vote; even he himself did not vote for any candidate, law, or issue.
The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I's correct prediction of the result of the U.S. presidential election in 1952.[1]
Issues around rigging the electoral roll are less of an issue than in voting because the person selected has to show up to do their job. It is far less effective to have dead people on the electoral roll because someone will need to impersonate the dead person if they are selected.
Sure. we can create the protocols, logic and software. As a technical prospect it's within reach. All beautiful in theory.
But can you imagine the corruption that would ensue?! Where would people store these tokens that represent literal political power? How would they verifiably redeem them?
The problem is infrastructure. Civic cybersecurity is a great steaming turd. Digital literacy has declined as people surrender in the face of "convenience". Smartphones are wide open gaping holes, pre-pwned out of the box by vendor malware. Much of our electronic communication is designed and built in hostile nation states, served by a handful of greedy and untrustworthy big-tech monopolies, and overseen by governments who actively labour night and day to weaken our security.
Until we live in an entirely different kind of technological culture, where people take more ownership of their technology (probably not within my own lifetime) I'll choose a piece of paper and a wooden box with a slot in it any day! That would be my informed choice as a computer scientist. Although, it is possible that with some clever mathematics and manufacturing technology (modern physical cash is an advanced technology) some kind of paper equivalent might be feasible. But first consider what happened in Russia when the people were issued share certificates in the ex-soviet economy and bartered them for food.
Well.. most developed countries do. But for America specifically, it has been a contentious matter.
Like, if there are two people participating and one’s random number is 01 and the other’s is 11 (binary), and you XOR them you get 10. But that doesn’t match any of the participants’ numbers, so who would win? Or does the number of possible outputs need to exactly match the number of participants? If so, does that mean the number of participants needs to be an exact power of 2?
Furthermore, in the majority of cases, we are only allowed to elect those who are pre-approved by The Red Party or The Blue Party. Both parties have biases. Worse they, like the examples mentioned, tend to leans towards self-serving (the party) and/or serving their own mwmbers (i.e., don't offer the best possible representation). It's like cliques in high school all over again.
What I'd like to see is simple. Add "None of the above" to every race. Let The People fully express themselves. Let them give the parties direct feedback about the products they're marketing. Yes, that's kind of what not voting it. Unfortunately, the fact is, the parties don't recognize that as a possible "Crap products" votes. They can phantom that. NotA would stuff it right in their face.
A nice quote about this, from a corrupt 19th-century NY politician and businessman: "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating"
Very nice speaker about this: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE
Beyond that there's also another issue related to the above. Because of aforementioned divisive rhetoric many people are no longer even voting for people they like or even want to win, but voting against a bogeyman of an opponent. They aren't voting for "their" side, but because they fear "the other side" winning would be catastrophically worse. I suspect very few people willing to vote in the first place would intentionally and actively "waste" their vote simply to make a point. And if you get some very small chunk of NotA then suddenly the powers that be might even claim that's an endorsement of them.
Voting third party achieves the same as your ideal without the possible perverse inverse messaging of approval.
The divisive rhetoric is part of a deliberate campaign to spread unrest by China and Russia, among other actors. The Citizens United ruling gave them unlimited spending power.
Don't take my word for it, this guy could see it coming 12 years ago:
And you’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections would not be a partisan issue. But of course, this is Washington in 2010. And the Republican leadership in the Senate is once again using every tactic and every maneuver they can to prevent the DISCLOSE Act from even coming up for an up or down vote.
--BHO
"last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections"
In response to this criticism of their recent ruling, Justice Samuel Alito shook his head and appeared to mouth "Not true."
--BHO
And on the individual (or grassroots) level it's really no different. Post bias affirming rage-bait drivel and get all the dopamine-hit-generating upvotes in social media one might ever want. Measured analysis? Meh, who cares about that.
And in the "real world" as well. As but one example higher educational attainment is strongly associated with dramatic increases in the perception gap [1] in society. And that gap is one of the primary driving factors in the divisiveness at all levels from politicians on down to you and I.
This would be a great time to explain why More In Common is not part of the propoganda effort. You have offices in France, Germany and the UK (according to your web page) yet you focus on the USA. You also have an 8 month old account with a few non-sequitur posts.
TL:DR; I've been doing this since 'palestine' would clumsily summon the I***i bots.
Yet BO didn't have anything to say about that. He's a great spokesperson. A great orator. But there are too many instance where credibility is questionable. The Paris Climate Agreement immediately comes to mind.
But if you say "Any given winner must have 40% of the total vote" and NotA is included in that universe, then there is an incentive of Party X and Party Y to field viable products. Then there is an incentive for - what's currently written off as - "disinterested voters" (i.e., not, it's crap product being sold) to have a say.
We are told, voting is a means for We The People to express ourselves and influence our representatives. Suppressing the NoaA vote is just that, voter suppression.
The bottom line: NotA is a simple means to a better ends. Without much effort, it addresses a handful of the flaws in the current system.
True story: I live in NJ, just outside the Phila, PA market. We saw *all* the Fetterman v Oz ads (for PA's Senate seat). If I called it a cluster f*k I'd be giving cluster and f*k a bad name. There is simply no way voting for either one of them way sending a message to anyone. If nothing else, it gave both major parties a free pass. It made thousands of voters complicit in the X + Y cartel.
I think it's easy to preach this idea that political parties only serve itself and don't care about anything else.
In truth it's something that is more or less required to be effective since voting is only 1 part of it (someone had to write the legislation and do investigations).
Of course the party cares what their members think otherwise what would be the point of being a member of said political party.
And lastly it needs to be stressed if a political party or candidate don't listen to their voters then (if it's a fair election) they won't be re-elected.
You already have that by turning in the ballot without marking that race.
Saying "no thank you" is not the same as not answering.
Incidentally, these color associations only became fixed in 2000, before then different media outlets used different color mappings. The fixed mapping is a creation of corporate media who wanted to simplify the presentation of American politics so even people with their brains completely turned off (e.g., sat in front of a television) could follow along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...
What do you mean by so few people? The size of the legislatures wouldn't necessarily change, so it's the same number of people at any given time, and since there's no reelection, it ends up being a larger number of people overall.
And I would say it's harder to corrupt people you don't have relationship with. Whereas long-serving politicians develop relationships with lobbyists over the years.
The biggest reduction of corruption is the elimination of campaign contributions, which is essentially legalized bribery. This leaves only illegal bribery, which can be prosecuted. You could audit randomly selected legislators for years after they leave office to make sure they're not taking bribes.
Except that the people in the legislature would have little to no knowledge about how things work, and so would heavily rely on the advice and expertise of the bureaucrats and lobbyists to know how to move on various topics.
With experienced legislatures they know the system and when someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Some people bemoan "career politicians", but in what other profession does (more experience = bad)? Carpenters, pilots, developers?
Like when we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly had weapons of mass destruction?
> Some people bemoan "career politicians", but in what other profession does (more experience = bad)? Carpenters, pilots, developers?
These professions aren't elected by popular vote, otherwise they would indeed be much worse.
If politicians were actually experienced at doing good, that would be great. Unfortunately the bulk of their experience is in popularity pageants, which does not prepare them for office.
Also, they don’t have as much to lose if they’re caught accepting a bribe. If a career politician is caught accepting a bribe, their career as a politician is over. But if a mechanic is caught accepting a bribe during their 2 year stint as a representative, they would suffer minimal reputational damage and could just go back to being a mechanic.
You also mentioned that you could prevent this with harsh penalties and long term audits, but I think it would be pretty easy to circumvent an audit. Like, if I wanted to bribe someone elected by sortition, I would just offer them free stuff instead of money so it’s harder to trace. Like free hotel stays or prepaid gift cards.
I could imagine apolitical people treating a sortition win like winning the lottery and expecting to get money out of it. And just auctioning their vote off to the highest bidder.
With all that said though, there would be a lot of advantages to sortition so the risk of corruption and bribery might still be worth it and would still probably be better than our current system.
The question is, bribe them to do what? Usually, you're bribing them to follow the preferences of the wealthy. Which already happens if the politician is wealthy! They're already voting for self-serving legislation. So in a sense, bribing the wealthy is more redundant than expensive. However, you might be surprised how little you have to contribute to a politician's reelection campaign to get the politician to do stuff for you.
> If a career politician is caught accepting a bribe, their career as a politician is over.
They go to jail. This has happened a number of times. Bribery is illegal.
> I would just offer them free stuff instead of money so it’s harder to trace. Like free hotel stays or prepaid gift cards.
This happens with politicians too. But they still get caught. Anyway, it's no harder or easier than doing the same thing with elected politicians.
presumably they would also go to prison
The issue is you can't prove these are bribes. There's no paper trail, no mysterious payments. Someone's expertise or worth to another is entirely arbitrary, you can't say someone's speaking fee is 'too large' or their experience isn't worth that much money, especially if they've had an unusually interesting position beforehand.
If a randomly selected citizen magically starts getting huge bank speaking fees afterwards, that's obviously a bribe.
As a society, we actually need to do more to make it the norm that people can temporarily switch their careers off and on again, for various reasons. Having a child is one crucial example.
how on earth are you going to legally differentiate this from a company simply hiring someone with experience in the political sphere? how are you going to prove that an after-dinner speech is proceeds from corrupt behaviour, and not just a speech from someone interesting that people may want to listen to? you’re going to ask a court to decide if someone is genuinely an interesting speaker?
there’s a good reason they're able to get away with this right now: it’s nearly impossible to legislate for. it’s very easy to spot, but without direct evidence of prior communication between the parties it’s extremely difficult to prove
my solution would be to give each of them a huge pension and ban them from ever working again. but that has its own problems
Experience in the political sphere is no longer a thing when the entire government consists of 1 year lifetime term limited random selections. Experience only has value now because there are "career politicians", political parties, campaign fundraising, etc.
Also keep in mind that without elections, they are no longer "representatives" and don't have "constituents". Therefore, the legislators no longer have to take private meetings or phone calls with anyone. This doesn't mean they won't listen to anyone or take advice, it just means that this can all occur in public hearings and not in private where deals are made. Lobbyists as such should cease to exist.
think about it like laws for drug paraphernalia. [1] no one is going to ban pipes and papers and lighters, because people use them for other things. obviously, when you see a weed pipe or papers designed for spliffs, you can tell that that’s what they’re for. but it’s extremely difficult to convict someone for possessing or selling them, because there are feasible alternative uses
this form of bribery is the same. obviously it’s very easy to spot someone bribed into a cushy job, but without actual evidence of collusion, are you going to get a conviction in a court of law operating under the principles of reasonable doubt? highly unlikely. it’s always going to be possible that that company simply liked how the representative did their job and hired them. or they like the PR of hiring ex-reps. or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court
if it could be done safely and reasonably, it probably already would have in our current systems
>they are no longer “representatives”
they would be representatives. I chose that word deliberately. I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large
[1] yes throughout time and space there have been and are laws against weed and drug paraphernalia, but they’re widely seen as a bad idea, and easily side-stepped
There's actually no reason why the voting record of a citizen legislator needs to be released to the public. They do it with elected officials, because if you're going to vote for someone, you want to know how they voted. But with unelected officials, it could be secret ballots, so nobody even knows how they did their job.
> they like the PR of hiring ex-reps.
There's no PR in hiring a randomly selected person who was only in office for 1 year. Nobody even knows the randos.
> or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court
Which reasons? All of the reasons that exist now relate to politicians having long experience, connections, and other things that go along with having a "career" in politics. None of the reasons hold for what is essentially a temp job.
> I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large
No, I'm not confusing anything. Getting randomly selected from the public is not the same as representing the public. An elected representative is expected to get the opinion of and serve their constituency. There's no such expectation in sortition. Compare with juries. A juror is mostly randomly selected from the public but doesn't "represent" the public. A juror doesn't need to consult the public about the trial; to the contrary, jurors are not even allowed to consult outsiders about the trial. A juror simply decides the case base on its merits and nothing else. There's no representation.
I think you're underestimating the inherent corruption of the current political system. By the time a politician takes office they're usually a "known quantity", because (1) they have to run an election campaign to introduce themselves to the public, and (2) in order to finance such a campaign, they have to raise money, which mostly involves going around begging wealthy interests for money. So such interests can already develop a relationship with the candidate before they get elected, by contributing money to their election campaign. Running for election is inherently corrupting in that way. Whereas government officials randomly selected from the public are wild cards. You can't just go around bribing a thousand unknown random people, because while some may take the bribe, the chances are decent that you'll run into a honest, ethical person who won't take the bribe but rather turn you into the authorities, and then you'll go to jail, because bribing a government official is a felony. All it takes is one honest randomly selected citizen to blow up the entire bribery scheme. So it would be massively dangerous for the briber. It's difficult to build "trusting" relationships with such short-term unknown legislators. This is why most political bribery takes the form of legal campaign contributions, which pose no danger to the contributor and are quite effective at getting results. Eliminate election campaigns, and you've eliminated the primary source of corruption.
We have to compare sortition against the current system, not against some ideal of perfection. If sortition is simply less corrupt that the current system, it's a win. You can always think of ways to game any system, but our current system is practically designed for corruption.
no sane court of law is going to convict representatives for getting a good job post hoc. there is far too much possibility for reasonable doubt. unless you fundamentally change the way the justice system works, that is not going to change
>which reasons?
do I really have to come up with these reasons? bear in mind that they don’t have to be rock solid, they just have to introduce reasonable doubt. since you almost certainly have no other evidence, “perhaps that could be true rather than collusion” is enough.
“their term made us aware of them and they seemed competent”; “they’re famous now and that’s good for sales”; “they made connections that could prove useful to the company”; “they look good to foreign investors/trading partners”; “patriotism!”; “we feel we have a duty to support our ex-reps!”; etc etc etc. there are a million reasons that any lawyer could come up with and sell to a jury
also, please don’t specifically try and defeat each thing I say. just address the central issue. I say that just like you can’t convict people for using drugs because they possesa drug paraphernalia, properly functioning courts will struggle to meet the burden of proof to convict this kind of bribery
you say that they won’t struggle because:
Heh, this is an interesting request.
> properly functioning courts will struggle to meet the burden of proof to convict this kind of bribery
I think this frames the issue in entirely the wrong way. My claim is that you can't safely offer bribes to a randomly selected citizen legislature.
Suppose the legislature has 1000 members, and they serve 1 year terms, maximum 1 term per lifetime. So as a wealthy interest attempting to trade jobs for political favors, you start out with 1000 complete strangers. They're unknown to you, and you're unknown to them. Moreover, they don't need to take meetings or phone calls with you, because you didn't vote for them (nobody did), you didn't finance their campaigns, they don't represent you, and they're not running for reelection, because they aren't elected, and they can't serve another term. Indeed, these legislators are likely to be suspicious of unsolicited inquiries, and rightly so. They probably don't even have time for your crap. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to somehow meet them, gain their trust, and offer them a bribe in less than 1 year, all while avoiding the honest citizen who responds to your offer by calling the cops. The burden of proof is pretty easy when the person bribed testifies against the briber.
speaking of that, you’ve moved the goalposts. you said that it would be easy to catch the people taking this style of bribe because of the more abrupt job change. I said that it’s almost impossible to legislate against that
now you’re trying to argue a separate issue: whether reps will take these bribes at all
however, your initial comment assumes that they might take these bribes, and my reply is based on that assumption. when you abandon that assumption, you’re not actually responding to me
if you’d like, you can reread our original two comments, but I’ve laid out the bones of it here:
your claim: easier to catch takers
my disputation: yes easier to catch but impossible to convict
your response: but takers wouldn’t take in the first place
do you see how that doesn’t follow?
Each gets longer and more detailed, as I defend my position. If length and details are a problem for you, then we'd better end the discussion here.
me: "This is actually why bribes to randomly selected citizens would be easier to catch."
you: "you said that it would be easy to catch the people taking this style of bribe"
I said easier. You misquoted me as saying easy. Easier != easy. We're comparing sortition to the current electoral system. Sortition just has to be better, it doesn't have to be perfect. Moreover, I said, "Many elected politicians have been criminally convicted of corruption", so it's not in fact impossible.
> now you’re trying to argue a separate issue: whether reps will take these bribes at all
> however, your initial comment assumes that they might take these bribes, and my reply is based on that assumption. when you abandon that assumption, you’re not actually responding to me
This is a misunderstanding. Of course some legislators (I won't call them "reps") might accept bribes. The problem is when some don't. When you're trying to bribe a bunch of random strangers, the number who don't accept bribes, even if the number is small, will blow up the whole bribery system and will send the bribers to jail.
Even if there's some level of bribery in sortition — which I believe can't be high, for reasons explained earlier — it would be vastly better than the current electoral system, which is legalized bribery via campaign contributions.
stop trying to move the goalposts
it is difficult to prosecute someone who has taken this kind of bribe, even in a system of sortitioning. do you have a refutation to this argument?
did you really think I was going to engage you in an exponentially growing series of piecemeal arguments growing less and less relevant with each iteration?
let’s close this by saying that you completely failed - and even resolutely avoided - giving any evidence or arguments that it would be even remotely possible to convict anyone for this, and then tried to prove yourself right in some alternative discussions about: sortitioning as a whole, the word “representative”, easy vs easier, the difficulty of bribing a representative, whether they have constituents, whether I have a correct grasp of corruption as a whole, etc etc etc etc, not a single one of which mattered to the central question of “would you be able to convict an ex-rep for having a sudden upwards change in job?” to which the answer is a resounding and unchallenged: no
I think the problem here is that you believe it's the central question, whereas I don't. It's a minor issue in the larger question of whether sortition is better than elections.
Anyway, I'll close this by dropping these links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_polit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_state_and_loc...
what I said was that it would be extremely hard to convict someone for this specific corruption, you disagreed, and we proceeded. if you don't have an argument to back up your disagreement, you misspoke, or misread, or jumped to a conclusion, that's fine, but you're just ignoring it and talking about other things as if you were right. does that seem to you like a rational mode of thought?
>these links:
this is the same thing again. we're not talking about general convictions for corruption, we're talking about convictions for this very specific kind of type of bribery, where your only evidence is a change of jobs
Sigh. Well, I've always been talking about that, and I didn't sign up for this conversation either. In any case, though, here's what I said before you first replied to me: "This is actually why bribes to randomly selected citizens would be easier to catch."
Note that catching is not the same as convicting, and that's not mere pedantry. In order to convict, you have to catch first, and my claim is that in a political environment where the legislators are randomly selected, the kind of corruption you talk about would stick out like a sore thumb. Whereas in our current system, the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying is pervasive, so a former representative getting a cushy job when they leave it not even notable, it's commonplace, the norm. In a sense, it's harder to catch a criminal when everyone is a criminal. If that continued to be the norm under sortition, it would indicate a massive flaw in the new system. It's one of the problems that sortition ought to fix, otherwise we're no better off than before. So as I said, "After a maximum 1 year term, a randomly selected citizen would be expected to go back to their previous line of work." It's automatically suspicious if they don't! Regardless of whether there's a criminal conviction at the end, there would be a level of personal scrutiny regarding the acceptance of post-service jobs that doesn't exist now, especially because under sortition there would be very little if any practical value in the "experience" of a temporary legislator to a potential employer, i.e., political connections, networks, and knowledge that currently take many years to acquire.
On the matter of conviction, you seem to assume that the laws would remain exactly the same as before, whereas I make no such assumption. Rather, I assume that the laws would get stricter, so it would be easier to convict a government official of corruption. Our current elected representatives who make the laws are too easy on themselves, precisely because soliciting money from corporate donors is how they got into office in the first place, so they don't want to cut off their source of power. If somewhat more honest folks were in charge, they wouldn't allow legislators to get away with a lot of the crap that's currently allowed.
I still like the idea, but something would need to be done about this. a fat pension perhaps. or anonymity. but that leads to its own issues
Sortition would remove the structural incentives towards corruption that exist today so our efforts to combat corruption should become easier.
1) make the sortition group big enough, say 1000 or 10000 people, so the required number of people bribed goes up, which increases bribery cost as well as chances of getting caught
2) make a bounty program to help put a lower bound on the cost to bribe
The UK recently got one: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04... - MPs can be recalled if they are jailed. Quite significant as during the Northern Ireland civil war several MPs were political prisoners.
> Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]:
> - Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process;
> - Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
> - The 9 name 40 nominees;
> - The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process;
> - the 12 name 25 nominees;
> - Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
> - The 9 name 45 nominees;
> - Reduce them to 11 by random processes;
> - The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be age≥40 years);
> - The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting!
> - This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice – they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto.
Love it or hate it but a minority of better organized elites will always run the show in every organization from a local bake sale to government.
When the Greeks did sortition, it wasn't perfect either. Laws ended up favoring the richest landowners, and the richest landowners tended to have a higher representation (in the boule anyway). They tried various means to engineer the problems away, but they persisted. This is because it's nigh-impossible to prevent human beings from figuring out a way to exploit a system when they are committed to the task.
Another way to have a superior political body is to make it superior and hold it to a standard. Rather than select average people, there should be basic requirements of intelligence, ethics, acts of good will, and the abandonment of luxuries, rewards and favors, in exchange for the support of the state. The state should support the education of the populous toward this end. In addition, the judgment over matters of serious concern should be presided over by experts. No decision of serious concern should be made without a meta-study, to root out bias and find the best possible solution.
Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones. Let the noblest and wisest lead us in a structure designed for reason and fairness.
It sounds like you're describing Plato's philosopher kings.
A key component of both sortition and Plato's Republic is that they're selecting leaders who aren't actively seeking power, in contrast to elections. (According to Plato, philosophers seek truth, not power, and must be forced to rule for the benefit of the community.)
That's the system we have now and it fails all the time, because the "experts" would rather give any answer than no answer, even if their data or understanding is insufficient to yield an accurate prediction.
Then try finding an old book and a very old story: "The Science of Government Founded on Natural Law" by Clinton Roosevelt a relative of the much better known Franklin Delano and one of the scammers of the NY bank who became the FED years later [1] or the blatant explanation that all society develop a kind of hierarchy who is not at all democratic (nor meritocratic) who drive and (ab)use the others not differently than a shepherd with the flock. Sometimes the shepherd is soft and hidden enough that the flock do not revolt, sometimes it's not and get assaulted by the flock, sometimes it have to create a bit of theater, like wrestling, pushing the flock to think there are different ideas into play, they decide etc. The modern version of ancient Greeks theater where the orator start to plead a cause, convincing spectators who acclaim, than start to plead the exact opposite, in equally convincing manners. Those who understand applaud, those who not think he/she made fun of them and try to assault physically...
[1] https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=car... the scam is well described by one of the scammers letter, itemized at the end of the long page for those who are curious.
Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses. Also, people have many different identies at the same time but but cannot represent them all equally well, anyways. So some aspects of society wouldn't be represented at all during a legislative period because everyone is supposed to represent their own identities, not someone else's.
So unless we create a legislative assembly that's so large that it borders on direct democracy, I don't see the benefit. And in that case, let's just have direct democracy. If necessary with a legal requirement to vote.
Lawmakers today rarely write the legislation they vote on. They have support staff and experts who assist them in drafting legislation. Nothing prevents providing similar infrastructure to representatives selected by sortition rather than elections.
> Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses.
Um... What? Minorities would unequivocally be better represented under sortition than under elections. Poor people would be better represented, women would be better represented, young people would be better represented. The primary group that would loser it's massive overrepresentation is the old rich white lawyers who dominate our current house and senate. Your argument here makes no sense.
Why do you assume there would be 3 branches of government like the current system?
As the article discusses, the founders of the US divided the government in order to dilute democracy and maintain the power of the economic elite.
The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician. I don't think it would be a problem if politicians ended up more naive as a result. Just having well-meaning politicians would be a significant step up.
That said, I think we should rely less on government intervention in the economy. We need to fix the monetary system to provide a level playing field, then once that's done, we need to trim back regulations. The way to solve the corporate monopolization problem is through increased competition. The government's primary role should be to promote maximum decentralization.
The government should not concern itself with equality of outcomes; it should only concern itself with equality of opportunities. It should not think about efficiency; it should trust the free market to take care of that.
This claim needs some back up. I don't think there's an innate difference between an "average citizen" and an "average modern politician". What separates them is the opportunity, and having a system in place that works to keep people honest. I'm watching my fellow citizens litter and help themselves to "free stuff", and the behavior of freshly minted "politicians" who get voted in by disgruntled voters of formerly fringe parties (or formerly fringe wings of established parties).
I'd like to hear how you propose to keep the "average citizen" principled in the face of increased access to opportunity and power.
That's silly. The politician is completing in a race that they are trying to win. The citizen is just trying to live, and takes time out of their life to vote and pick someone who might (might!) have a shot at fixing some of the things that annoy them without breaking some of the things that actually work. The politician is goal-oriented, the citizen is existence-oriented.
Choosing people at random is not going to work well. Look at what happens with juries - lots of people find creative ways to get out of jury duty and that's for a way smaller commitment of time than a political term. The randomly chosen person won't want to be in government at all. Their life has just been totally up-ended through no fault of their own. Now no matter what they do, they're going to be wildly famous and wildly unpopular with huge segments of the population. All they wanted was to do their job and take care of their family, now they're getting harassed on the street by political enemies, having to go on TV, having to justify their decisions to journalists. Presumably some of the really unlucky ones will have to become ministers, but how do they even get picked?
No, the randomly chosen person has no reason to give a single damn about anything or anyone except themselves in that position. Heck half of them will be thinking: if I just refuse to turn up to work, maybe there'll be a recall and a new person will be randomly chosen.
Then take into account all the exceptions and justifiable reasons why people will be able to get out of this duty (e.g. because they're sick, because they're caregivers, because they're non-citizens, because they're mothers, because their company testifies that person is critical to their operations, etc). The ones you'll end up with are the ones who have nothing better to do. Expect the terminally unemployed to be over-represented.
Exactly. In the current system, a candidate requires substantial funding in order to run. Who has that kind of money to spend on politics? Big corporations! What sort of people would these corporations want in government?
The most valuable trait in a politician from the perspective of a big corporate donor is corruptibility (their eagerness to cater to the needs of big financial interests). They are literally put forward on that basis. If the selection process was random, then political candidates would only be as corrupt as the average person; which would not be too bad.
There is a difference: politicians actively seek power. This already raises suspicions about a person, in my opinion.
Also, running for office takes money, so the average modern politician needs to raise a lot of money. How do you raise a lot of money? Make friends with rich people and do favors for them, obviously.
But at least in my country and city, if decisions were made by the average citizen, we would be living as in the 80s. Every time they remove a parking spot to make room for a bike lane or a wider sidewalk, people complain (even if in the long term, many end up seeing the benefits). Maybe it depends on the country, but at least in my place the average citizen is very, very reactionary. They want everything as it always was.
Politicians, with all their failures (we have plenty of corrupt ones here), tend to have more long-term thinking that Joe Sixpack.
1. They're too small.
2. They're not totally random. The attorneys are allowed to eliminate members of the pool.
3. The jury doesn't actually run the trial. Nor do they run the police department, for that matter. The trial is run by the judge and the attorneys. The jury is mostly passive listeners. They're spoon-fed info at the trial and not even allowed to know all the facts.
4. Jury terms are too short. Contrary to what the previous commenter suggested, it's not ideal to have short terms. Citizen legislators should probably serve 1 or 2 year times. They need time to learn how to do the job. They probably need preparation before they take the job.
This is election as per 18th century Britain elections by the propertied classes.
>Homogenous
There are four language regions, how is it homogenous.
I'm increasingly persuaded by Plato's 5 Regime's view. In a nutshell, each system has its own virtue which taken to extremes becomes its vice and leads to its downfall and transition into the next system. The 5 regimes being Aristocracy, Timocracy (an implicitly anti-materialist government driven by systems of honor - think Spartans or Klingons - the Wiki page on this topic is simply wrong), Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny.
Also who writes what could be complex legislation for complex issues?
For reference see one of the biggest NFT drops this year and the pleas they made to not buy KYC’d addresses: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/29/please-dont-buy-a...
The same people who currently write it - policy analysts and lawyers.
Besides, handing nukes over to a plebiscite is a bone-chillingly awful idea. In the days following 9/11 I think we probably would have voted to start a nuclear war. The public, save the Dixie Chicks, were even more blood thirsty than the US Government.
The US government used 9/11 as an excuse to invade two countries.
Iraq was not involved in 9/11 at all, despite allegations, and it didn't have WMD either, despite allegations.
And we invaded Afghanistan, but bin Laden was eventually found in Pakistan, our "ally".
The US public might have voted to invade Saudi Arabia, which actually would have made more sense than Afghanistan or Iraq.
If we had been under a direct democracy at that time, the inter-personal pressure to conform would have been even greater. As it stands, the opinions of your fellow citizen are relatively low stakes because they aren't the ones actually calling the shots, and they know you aren't either. This indirect nature of representative democracy is conducive to political tolerance at the inter-personal level.
I don't recall this. Citation?
> I think the other nuclear powers would be a lot more nervous if the American public were in direct control of those nukes. It simply isn't safe.
Do you think the Trump is safer?
An elected US President (Truman) was the only one to ever use a nuclear weapon. Without consulting the public first.
FWIW, I pay most of my taxes to the Gemeinde and Canton. About 3% goes to the Federal state, which I assume is mostly to the (compulsory) military.
It seems to me as a foreigner that a large part of the U.S. problems(and indeed the world) is the concentration of power to the U.S. federal state.
Here's an idea, let's try first having PG give YCombinator funding to startups based on a random lottery, rather than actually picking them. When that's successful, then we can talk.
It arrived on the front page today because it was submitted today, and because it's an interesting and relevant article, regardless of the election result.
You'll have to ask the submitter haakonhr about the timing, but 6 days is a reasonable amount of time to discover, read, and submit an article from the Boston Review.
― T.S. Eliot, The Rock
The general public get to know their national candidates first at the local and then state level, and those candidates are judged as "better than a head of lettuce" by their peers in office.
The political wing of government is essentially (ideally) just about debating policy - it's the civil service, military, and judicial wings that get tasked with making things happen (subject to checks and balances).
Each voter gets say (for example) 1,000 votes, which they allocate to whichever parties they want at election time.
The number of votes a party gets become its “currency”.
Any political party can put forward legislation to become law. They back their legislation with some number of their votes/currency.
Other parties can defeat legislation by spending a greater number of their votes to stop it.
When a party has spent all its votes/currency, it must wait till the next election to get more.
When distribution is equal or in your favor, the obvious gambit here is to propose abhorrent legislation to the opposition. They will be forced to spend more votes to stop it. Leaving you with enough votes to strong arm any legislation you want.
Any minority of power no matter the margin would be effectively silenced.
Maybe it’s different with multiple parties in play but if we could stabilize a more than two party system then that changes the calculus of the status quo too.
It’s precisely intended that if a party wants to spend all its its capital opposing, then it does that at the cost of being able to advance its own policies.
Chaos in law-making is probably worse than the disaster of two-party first-past-the-post.
Switzerland works like this. It is a good system.
You could 2:1 amplify the power of your votes by creating a bullshit generator and the side with the most voluminous BS would end up with the only votes left.
These people are almost charmingly shameless. Rather than do better, they just want to put the fix in for the next time.
Rather than dismissing "these people", perhaps you would benefit from engaging intellectually with the idea. If you did, you would probably find that the supporters of this idea are very different from what you are imagining.
I'm quite familiar with the concept and have had to implement non-FPtP voting schemes. However, it is a trap to engage with the disingenuous.
Please don't try to shut down discussions with poorly constructed conspiracy theories.
That's the same "conspiracy theory" he's talking about..
> However, it is a trap to engage with the disingenuous.
I agree that there was clearly no conspiracy. However, the implication that was made is that the left is disingenuously conspiring in the support of this article / attitude.
> It seems fairly safe to presume it was posted in anticipation of being upset with the results
Doesn't seem like a safe presumption to me. This is a congressional election and congress is not very popular with either partisan electorate. The simplest explanation is that this is a journalist capitalizing on popular sentiment and a hot topic with an article.
However the issue is that the party members are a small proportion of the general public.
Thus a small group is enough to win the vote in the party, This tends in a two party system to make the winner more extreme and less likely to be liked by the general public.
See Liz Truss as a good example here (as well as Trump)
https://ballotpedia.org/Superdelegates_and_the_2020_Democrat...
Gerrymandering, yo.
This is _such_ a US centric view. Guys, you have way a worst problem than elections. You have a party strongly pursuing getting rid of democratic results altogether.
Beyond the stated (That G word) the republican party is STRONGLY preparing the landscape to not recognize the results of the next election (Or the next one after that).
I actually have a bet with a friend about when the last democratic election is going to happen, and my money is on this last midterms being the ones (Gotta reckon, I wasn't expecting Gen-Z, and I'm gladly surprised I might be wrong).
Take for instance the last election in Brazil, where Lula beat Bolzonaro by the bare minimum: 51% to 49%. What would had been the results of such an election in the US? In 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, and _still_ Trump won the presidential race. In 2020, even thought Biden wan the popular vote by a large margin, the results were still down to a handful of votes [1]
The problem, as I see it, is that you have a democratic system that allows for suppressing democracy.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-thes...
You've literally got republican candidates (I think actually voted in now) saying unless they win the election was false/stolen. There is something very wrong with that.
But as you state, there's nobody countering my comment.
All in all, interesting times. Obviously nobody wants a non-democratic US, but if that happens, I'm going to have the popcorn ready.
For what it is worth, I am French, and my country recently made a sortition experiment[1] that I found less than convincing. This was in response to the yellow vest movement. I did not feel represented by that 'citizens convention'. I do not know what part of their propositions come from them, and what part come from the experts advising them. Some of their propositions (like putting a more stringent speed limit on highways) were not implemented because, ironically, they were impopular. The whole thing felt like a failed experiment to me.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
Not sure that's the goal as such. The goal is to have a selection system that's incorruptible.
> Without any further selection, you will eventually (and sooner than you would expect) put terrible or incompetent people in power.
Well, we have that already. I like the odds of random selection a lot better. With the current system, we're practically guaranteed of getting terrible or incompetent people in power.
> I am French, and my country recently made a sortition experiment[1]
150 people seems pretty small. The US House of Representatives has over 500 members.
- The lot was usually determined by birth, so it tended to perpetuate privilege.
- People who didn't want to serve often found ways to get out of it, so the people who ended up serving were often the ones who didn't want to.
- It resulted in a lot of incompetent people in positions of power.
- And perhaps worst of all, it tended to breed a culture of resentment and envy, since the people who were chosen by lot often felt that they didn't deserve it and the people who weren't chosen often felt that they did.
The idea that democracy by lottery is a good idea is simply absurd.
Yes, the article covers this.
> and quickly abandoned because it resulted in disastrous consequences for the city.
You're gonna need a citation for this.
> The consequences were so bad that the idea was never seriously considered again until now.
This is not factually accurate. The article mentions that sortition was seriously considered by some founders. It has also been used in various forms throughout the world. Several of those examples are discussed throughout this thread.