To Save America's Democracy We Should End Elections

The word for this is sortition. It does have an interesting history. I like the idea, but I'd want to see it on a smaller scale before committing to it. Maybe a city or one of the smaller states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Sortition (the formal term for this) is very attractive, because it seems it would eliminate corruption and other political ills. The problem is that the bureaucracy (he part of the executive branch that has some legislative power) would grow, become more corrupt itself, and become very effective at manipulating the citizen-legislators. I don't think you can eliminate the Federal or State bureaucracies without also parallelizing the legislative process.

Now, don't get me wrong, sortition may improve things for a time. But like code, people figure out how to take advantage of laws. Re-writing the US Constitution on a regular basis is very risky; instead, SCOTUS changes it's opinion on what the Constitution means periodically; it's like updating the interpreter's code instead of changing user-submitted code.

You might also be interested in the districting method in which you draw district boundaries through the middle of high-population areas. Half the population would be on either side of each boundary. You keep subdividing until you have as many districts as needed. (Sorry, I don't remember the name for this, but it was the best option I could find when I last looked into this topic more than a decade ago.)

Hi HN, I've been thinking about this for months now and with each pass I find myself more enamored with it as a mode of achieving representative democracy. Interested to hear your thoughts. I think this would be an entire constitutional re-write if implemented, but I am optimistic that random sequestered groups of our peers would work quite well as legislative representatives and do a decent job in earnest. Maybe each law would have an expiration date with varying lengths determined by degree of consensus. E.g foundational rights should consistently yield 100% support of Freedom of speech and would be due to renew once a decade while novel laws with smaller pluralities could be briefly trialed and discarded by default if not successful

His critique of the electoral process and its effects is spot on, but the alternative that he gestures towards (with such contrasting vagueness) does not exist.

Or just stop radical policies that lays the groundwork for demagouges and populists?

David Van Reybrouck wrote "Against Elections: The Case for Democracy" about a decade ago.

I have mixed feelings about it: it sounds nice in theory, but it's unclear how well it would work in practice.

A lot of ideas from Muammar Gaddafi's early reign sound quite nice too. In practice it didn't really work out so well. Some communist movements didn't have such bad ideas either, and we all know how that worked out.

If anything, the thing that Trump and Co. have underscored is that a very important task of democratic systems is to prevent bad faith actors from doing bad faith things. It's often hard to predict how bad faith actors will try to abuse things.

Sortition might not help. The problems include:

• Skiving. People don't want to be torn from their lives and careers to do something else against their will. In the jury system this shows up as people deliberately trying to be excluded, which isn't that hard.

• Length of time required. Jury trials last a few days or weeks, maybe months in really extreme cases. It often takes new ministers months to merely get up to speed on their brief, let alone work out what should be done and how to actually pass legislation. Everyone would spend 90% of their time just working out how the process works, then they'd leave and it'd start all over again.

• Ease of manipulating the legislators. Combine ignorance, apathy and a strong resistance to even being there at all (they're being forced!), and what you get is people finding ways to outsource the work as much as possible. If you think lobbyists writing laws is a problem with professional politicians, that'd be nothing compared to unprofessional ones who even in the absolute best case will have no idea what they're doing and need all the help they can get. If you try and block external lobbyists, all you do is fully empower internal lobbyists (e.g. civil servants with an agenda).

Sortition could maybe work in a very libertarian state in which there are very few laws or welfare programs, and so the average group of legislators don't need to do much and can master the process quickly. In the past politicians were often part time, in some parts of the world this still happens at the local level. But if you want something at the scale of the US government it seems completely unworkable. Even with hundreds of full time professional legislators they still outsource huge amounts of lawmaking to executive agencies. Sortition would just set that to be 100% and there'd be no accountability.

Let's randomly summon citizens to serve brief terms as legislators. It's less crazy than it sounds and even if it weren't it still sounds better than what we've got. For the people by the people. You're already destined to be judged by such a group in the court of law. I offer that sequestered citizen legislators would perform their function radically better than our current system