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Comment by breuleux | Hacker News Reader

Voting is a deeply flawed decision making process compared to deliberation. If there are too many stakeholders for direct deliberation to scale, it is better to just pick a random sample of them and have them deliberate. You can have the sample vote afterwards to get the final result if they can't come to an agreement, but then you don't need fancy tech to check or tally the votes, you just need a room.

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>you just need a room.

I know Switzerland is small but still to big to put us all in a room, also who decides who the "random sample" is? People from Cities, Land? French speaking or German? Voting is the the only provable and fair decision making, however the pre-vote-training of the voters (aka marketing, media and money) is the big problem for me.

What do you mean, who decides? Verifiably picking a random sample isn't technically difficult, you give everyone an ID, pick a known PRNG algorithm, publish a seed, let anyone send in a salt in public if they want to, and then anyone can run the whole selection process.

> the pre-vote-training of the voters (aka marketing, media and money) is the big problem for me.

It's not merely that. These are very complicated matters that take time and energy to understand, and voters don't have the necessary time and resources to dedicate. Voters are also asked to vote for people they cannot directly talk to. Everything has to be done through intermediaries and middlemen, because direct communication doesn't scale. That's why picking a smaller sample is interesting: if you pick a hundred people at random, you can pay them to simply think and talk to each other, and you can reduce (although not completely eliminate) the influence of marketing, media and money.

>random sample isn't technically difficult, you give everyone an ID

Have you ever had a gummy bear package with nearly just green bears in it?

Sure as long as I get to pick the sample.

Sure, as long as it's a random sample

Absolutely, as long as I get to pick the random number generator that generates the random sample.

The way it would likely work is that a cryptographically secure open source random algorithm is made known long in advance which takes, say, a full hour to run on top of the line computers. In the hour before it is run, anyone can send in a number of their choosing, which are all added up (or rather their concatenation is cryptographically hashed) to make the seed. Then anyone can check that their number was indeed included and run the algorithm themselves to verify. It really only takes a single honest person to send in a 20-digit number to make it basically impossible to manipulate. Maybe I'm missing something.

One way to resolve the issue is to use a distributed randomness generator like DRand which is threshold decryption based and hence can offer some robustness as well.

Why take random samples if you tell your citizens that everyone has a vote? How do you proof it was random, and what do you do if by random chance you got a really on sided group? Sorry we have now a fascist state but it was random so it's fair.

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