We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government (2019)

https://thewalrus.ca/why-we-should-let-a-lottery-decide-our-government/

by Tomte • 1 year ago

64 78 1 year ago

pjio2• 1 year ago

I'm absolutely for trying this out. But not in the country I live in.

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

I think it makes sense in terms of a multicameral legislature. I can't imagine you want to pick the president by lottery or probably not even senators but why not the House of Representatives? Maybe we need a lawyer-heavy legislative body to write laws, but we also need legislators who aren't lawyers so people believe somebody in the legislature has some empathy for them.

pjio2• 1 year ago

As an additional committee which has to approve laws this might really make sense.

adrian_b• 1 year ago

I think that it is for the president where this would be most beneficial.

For senators and representatives there still is a little randomness, but when I look at many presidents that have been elected in recent years in various countries, it is more than obvious that any randomly chosen individual would have been almost certainly a less bad human and more suitable for the presidential position.

After a president is chosen by lottery, there should be a rejection procedure, to eliminate any really inappropriate candidate, but then a new candidate should be chosen by lottery to replace the rejected one, until no reasons for rejection can be found.

xivzgrev• 1 year ago

Could be interesting. My main fear would be a wider variability in behavior, reducing effectiveness.

Currently there are incentives against representatives acting too much like assholes - they would lose the support of their political party, effectively ending their career.

Randomly chosen people have no such incentive. Take the loudest, most obnoxious people and put them in our congress? Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.

I’m sure most people chosen would be fine, but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the batch / process.

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

It goes the other way around. I'd think the kind of people who get elected today, if offered a chance to be corrupt, would often decline politely or it would be possible for people to extend feelers to get some idea about it.

Trying to corrupt a set of random Americans who weren't selected by "being good at politics" would be like a game of Russian Roulette. Some people would go for it but sooner or later you'd be looking at the barrel of a gun or get the police called on you or something.

vorpalhex• 1 year ago

The primary form of corruption we see is an indirect tit-for-tat. "You buy our x,y and z and we'll hire you for a cushy gig many years from now."

And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more.

Government by lotto would dramatically increase corruption.

namlem4• 1 year ago

When France had a citizens' assembly on climate, lobbyists from both the government and corporations tried to approach some delegates outside of the assembly and they were promptly snitched on.

AnimalMuppet4• 1 year ago

Why would random selection wind up putting the loudest, most obnoxious people in Congress? Why would it be worse at it than, say, the current process?

Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.

Yeah, that sounds very much like the current Congress...

aaronbaugher2• 1 year ago

I've served on a few juries, and they've been far more sensible than Congress. I'm all for selecting representatives the same way, randomly from a pool of law-abiding citizens. Most of the work could be done remotely, so people wouldn't have to quit their jobs and go live in the capital and lose touch with the people back home. Keep the terms short, like 6 months, so they don't have much chance to "grow in office" and start trying to rule the world. Offer a decent stipend to pay for the inconvenience, which could be a fraction of what the current ones cost.

You'd probably have to have a hardship opt-out for people who honestly couldn't do it for personal reasons. But as long as it wasn't too strenuous--and there's no reason it should be--most would be willing to do it, just like jury duty. It's a great idea, very democratic.

lotharcable• 1 year ago

Right now most Democratic systems are a contest to find the most perfect high functioning psychopath.

It filters for people who possess the ability to lie very convincingly, tell people what they want to hear, disregard their own failings, and high levels of superficial charm and a overwhelmingly strong desire for social status and access to power.

Also in the last 75 years or so, due to the way party politics dominate election choices and the nature of internal politics there has been a rise in the 'professionalization' of the political class. Decades ago representatives were often people with professional expertise and notority outside of politics who are more or less amateurs. Now the vast majority of politicians are people who have dedicated their entire lives to it.

However it is a profession with no professional standards, no training, no monitoring body, no certification system, and is largely unaccountable.

All of these are very bad things to have in a representational democracy because having a dedicated class of managers it is not representational at all.

Where as a lotto system solves all these problems.

ramesh312• 1 year ago

Conveniently ignoring the fact that the word "citizen" in Athens referred to wealthy (free) adult males who had completed military service, whose parents were both citizens, and even then not always. It was in no ways representative, even if nominally democratic among those privileged few. We take the 14th amendment (birthright citizenship + equal protection) for granted now, but it was truly a revolutionary act in all of world history at the time. Our modern systems of mass elected representative democracy were shaped in the aftermath of that, and are far more equal than anything the people of Athens could have ever dreamed of.

WesolyKubeczek• 1 year ago

the word "citizen" in Athens referred to wealthy (free) adult males
whose parents were both citizens

Something does not compute here for me.

ramesh312• 1 year ago

Athenians had many subtly different tiers of citizenship. Women of noble birth, whose father had served in the military, were considered "citizens" in the sense that their male children would be considered legitimate, and they would be granted certain social and economic rights, although this did not extend to political rights for themselves [0].

[0] http://athensjournals.gr/history/2017-3-2-2-Che.pdf

chr15m2• 1 year ago

Why not both? The selection of the Venetian Doge had alternating rounds of election and sortition. Apparently this served to ward off power hungry egomaniacs. Could be useful today.

chr15m2• 1 year ago

It was like that for 500 years:

New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.[31] --wikipedia

aeontech• 1 year ago

Wow, that is a brilliant approach. Thank you for sharing. In the US we seem to be stuck in a local maximum (or local minimum) with little chance of changes to the existing system - I wonder what kind of solutions exist to transform an entrenched institutional process, barring drastic upheaval...

namlem4• 1 year ago

Yep! I actually wrote a piece about how the Venetian system might be adapted for the modern day: https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-techn...

cjbgkagh6• 1 year ago

The hereditary House of Lords had a bit of a random walk property where the original peerage given by the King many generations ago becomes quite disconnected to the peer now in the house. To have this property it needs to be an old tradition - to recover this property if recreating it from scratch perhaps an initial lottery could be used.

In any case it is an example of some randomness in the political process and in my opinion probably better than non-hereditary peerage where the peer has bought their position from the sitting government. Though that is a rather low bar.

With regards to historical lotteries if I remember my history class from decades ago the various great families didn’t want the role of governance because they had to act in the national interest instead of their house interest, and the randomness of the lottery meant that if they ruled in their own favor they’d be open to reprisal after their tenure was completed.

PaulRobinson4• 1 year ago

Hereditary peers are now a minority and on their way out. Within the next generation they'll all be gone.

Did you know you can just apply to be a peer? Like, literally, anyone can do this: https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/how-to-apply-2

cjbgkagh6• 1 year ago

I think the government strategy there was to make it worse to the point people question why even have the House of Lords and there being no good answer.

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

Treating legislation like jury duty could be interesting. The question is who would be responsible for weeding out the legislator pool? Representatives from the political parties perhaps? Maybe a senate proposes laws and then a true representative body would be in charge of deciding if the proposal should pass? They serve a couple weeks passing laws and then are dismissed. It might be interesting to try on a state/local level.

xp842• 1 year ago

Representatives from the political parties

Okay, hold it right there: any proposal for reform that doesn’t begin with throwing all of those people straight into the ocean is a nonstarter for me.

whack• 1 year ago

Most modern incarnations of this idea revolve around Citizen Assemblies. Ireland, as an example, convened a citizen assembly in order to discuss and propose reforms on topics like abortion, climate change, and political reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland)

The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations.

In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well

https://www.electionbyjury.org/

martin-t• 1 year ago

I don't see why not just skip the "representatives" part and have juries vote on laws directly.

If you take away the little power people have to influence the government, why not at least do it without adding another layer of indirection?

The idea of a representative is flawed from the start to begin with. There is probably no single person in my country who agrees with me on everything. Therefore any person I choose to represent myself is only an approximation of what I really want.

I increasingly feel like the belief that people need to be ruled by powerful individuals (or worse, i single individual) comes from some primitive need that evolved back when combat ability was your group's primary predictor of survival.

dmoy2• 1 year ago

Yea one nice characteristic of a representative democracy is that the voting is a rough approximation of who would win if the swords (guns, whatever) came out and it devolved into civil war. But without the bloodshed and loss.

Doesn't work as well as a proxy in the modern age with our level of technology though I suppose.

xp842• 1 year ago

In theory, I think the argument for juries electing candidates is one of efficiency: back in normal times, there were many, many issues facing Congress in a given year, and they would pass lots of legislation to handle those issues. Empaneling a new jury for each update to the farm bill or appropriation of money for some random government program seems like a lot of overhead. On the other hand, in the current ridiculous US atmosphere, it seems like Congress only passes a couple bills each session, which are enormous omnibus spending bills using strategic pork and legislative tricks to bypass the consensus-based rules that used to be easy to meet before polarization. I don’t think that’s a good condition though.

I agree that the extreme, though, where a jury elects a monarch, would be excessive. I would be interested in a system where separate juries elect government ministers (e.g. Defence, Education, Housing, etc), so that there would be a better chance that average people’s opinions could be taken into account in the running of each of the government agencies, instead of having all of them run by the same ideology because they’re all appointed by one party or president.

gjm112• 1 year ago

If you have independent votes on everything then you run the risk that there are a bunch of mutually-incompatible things that all get majority approval.

(Would you rather higher taxes or lower? Lower, of course. Higher state pensions or lower? Higher, of course. Stronger or weaker military? Stronger, of course. Better or worse infrastructure? Better, of course. More teachers or fewer? More, of course. More national debt or less? Less, of course. Etc.)

This doesn't require any individual person to be irrational or forgetful or anything, although in fact people frequently are.

Also, whoever selects just which things get voted on has a great deal of power, more than most elected representatives have. If those people are elected then you've effectively got a representative democracy after all; if not, then arguably you've effectively not got a democracy at all.

Representative government as such doesn't solve this problem, but in practice it means that a candidate or party proposes a whole basket of policies to get judged collectively, and between when they get into power and when the electorate decides whether they did a good enough job to elect them again there's enough time for a wide variety of those different interacting things all to have happened and either worked well or not.

I don't want to claim that this works particularly well. But it feels to me like any sort of direct democracy would likely work much worse.

(Maybe there's scope for a hybrid system: elections every few years for representatives who are then obliged to put various classes of major decision to a national vote.)

bestouff• 1 year ago

I'm always impressed how many of our problems were solved very long ago (in this case, we know Athenians did "Citizen Assemblies" more than a thousand years ago) but then our systems slowly decay and the solution is lost.

That means a well working democratic country with a working welfare and social net will eventually degrade into some random authoritarian shithole. That scares me.

ta12653421• 1 year ago

Not true: While frame as "the holy first democratic state", most people were excluded: The ones who were allowed to vote/elect, were mainly the rich upperclass, Women, Slaves, Children etc. weren allowed to participate / attend.

shw1n2• 1 year ago

One of my favorite quotes re: the classics:

"Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago."

namlem4• 1 year ago

Keep in mind that Athenian democracy was ended through conquest by Macedon, not internal collapse.

mlsu• 1 year ago

I dream of this so much. I’ve spent a lot of time in court around juries. It is truly amazing how reasonable people are, how much they listen, and how seriously they take the process. Seeing how regular people acted in jury duty is one of the few things that gives me hope about our country.

By and large, if you give a “Regular Person” a “Solemn Important Duty”, they rise to it and give it their best. We should seek to cultivate institutions that do this far more often.

jawns• 1 year ago

If you're interested in a literary take on this concept, read "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton in 1904.

Available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm

rafd• 1 year ago

Terry Bouricius (Vermont politician) has a draft book on this topic (link below). He used to be a strong advocate for electoral reform, but after seeing Citizen Assemblies in action, now advocates for Sortition.

He has some interesting ideas about how to structure a modern government with sortition - it wouldn't just be replacing the House and Senate with randomly selected representatives, but, instead: having more smaller bodies with more limited scope (ex. a body for defining the rules of bodies), and spinning out a new group for every major law proposal.

My favorite discovery on this topic (mentioned in the book), were letters between the Founding Fathers of the US where they explicitly discussed not having "democracy" in the United States, because it would give too much power to the people, and so they purposefully chose an election based system because it allowed for elites to retain control by using money to run campaigns (note also: "democracy" at the time referred exclusively to Athenian style democracy).

https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-el...

shw1n2• 1 year ago

Would these letters be The Federalist Papers?

dmoy2• 1 year ago

I don't think you can characterize the federalist papers as letters between the founding fathers. Those were essays by like 2-3 of them, published and pretty widely distributed

toss12• 1 year ago

I've long thought sortition could be adapted for our government and make it more democratic. Properly randomized selection among the qualified and willing would ensure no one has a sufficient chance of great power to make it worth attempting to plot to exploit the system for their benefit (although some opportunist would try while in office). I'd have it work something like the following:

Once a person has achieved a certain level of demonstrated competence and responsibility, they are entered into the pool. The criteria might include a college degree, certain military rank, level of business responsibility, running a charity of a certain size and success level, etc.

The willing must also pass a series of tests, e.g., the standard security clearance, citizenship test, knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc. Once in the pool, it is like Jury Duty; your number comes up, you get a quick screen for the office, exemptions for hardship (so the alternate is picked) and that will be your job for the term.

To mitigate the problem of everyone in govt being newbies, once in office, any official can stand for a confidence/no-confidence vote for re-election for one or two terms (depending on the office).

The pay would be the greater of the 75th percentile earnings or 100% of the officials documented income for the previous three years.

Obviously, this is a mere headline sketch and needs many more details and suggestions to work, but it seems it would improve on the current situation.

Thoughts?

Tuperoir• 1 year ago

knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc.

Who would remain ? What would be the incentive to train for this, besides money ?

toss12• 1 year ago

I'm not talking expert-professional-level knowledge.

Merely sufficient familiarity with the STEM, History, etc. to be able to pass undergrad distributive requirements. In this age, if you do not have a clue about how the scientific process actually works and basic concepts, and you don't understand the basics of how and why the country and it's constitution are built, you do not have any business writing the laws of the country. Too many current congress people couldn't pass these tests and it shows.

If we cannot, among a country of ~330 million, with 90+million with college education or above [0], find less then 20,000 [1] qualified and willing to fill state and national offices, we are pretty much doomed as a nation.

Even if we do something like include all 500k local offices, and then require prior local or state service to fill a national office, it should be a good selection.

OFC, if there is a problem, you can always increase the incentives (good idea) or lower the standards (bad idea). Since it is a temporary office, making the pay even more attractive than I mentioned above would be good -make it 95th-percentile or 115% of previous income to compensate for any inconvenience (e.g., a business owner who must vacate their position for 2yrs will likely have costs)

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-att...

[1] https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-i...

PaulRobinson4• 1 year ago

We shouldn't do this, because it's not democratic.

First, people talking about the Athenian system - it was limited to "Free men" of Athens. The discrimination might be something you feel we could counter today - all men and women could be selected - but what about convicted felons? Would they have a right to participate? Today, one is President of the USA (yes, I know, many think that's a sham, but legally he is). What about gay people? 50 years ago they almost certainly wouldn't have been allowed in. 150 years ago black people wouldn't. What about today's political third rail populations? Would communists or socialists or anarchists be allowed in? What about trans? Or people not born in the USA?

There will always be a group some part of the spectrum wants to other and exclude, but today there is a democratic short circuit: an Austrian can be voted into being the Governor of California; a convicted felon can be voted into the position of President; a transgender woman can be voted into Congress by her Delaware constituents.

Balloting - almost like voting today - will get systematic tinkering. Voting isn't perfect. Gerrymandering in the US is out of control and a more neutral system like the UK's needs creating, and yeah, donations are a mess...

... but choosing people at random is never really random, and there is no easy way to short circuit the orthodoxy. Minorities will get better representation at first, but they'll always be minorities and if the majority wants rid, they'll be locked out forever, just the same way women and slaves were in Athens.

thecrash• 1 year ago

Your concerns about a majority oppressing a minority are well-founded, but a system where people vote for career politicians don't seem to be moderating this problem - if anything it's exaggerating it.

If you trust the general population to vote a marginalized person into office in order to push legislation which benefits that marginalized community, why wouldn't you trust the general population to pass that legislation directly?

The only explanation I can think of is that you think that professional political representatives will have better ideas than the general population.

namlem4• 1 year ago

Actually, it's elections that are fundamentally undemocratic. Democracy literally means "rule by the public", which elections are not. Elections are merely rule by elites which have the nominal consent of the public. In practice, this consent is mostly illusory, as voters have no incentive to spend hours of time and effort becoming well-informed given how dilute their individual votes are. So really, elections are rule by influential groups such as media institutions and organized voting blocs.

You cite the UK as an example, but it's even less representative than the US. Parties often win majorities in parliament with only ~35% of the vote.

Sortition meanwhile, takes a representative sample of the public and offers them the time and resources to carefully research and deliberate. It's much closer to the democratic ideal of direct rule by the demos.

gjm112• 1 year ago

This submission is currently marked as [flagged] but I can't see what is supposedly wrong with it: it's an interesting article about an interesting idea, and while it's kinda politics-adjacent it's not the sort of party-political that tends to induce rage and stupidity, and the comments here seem pretty reasonable.

I guess there's a sizeable contingent of HN readers who don't want anything having anything to do with politics on HN, but I think some politics-related things -- including this -- fall into the category of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

rawgabbit• 1 year ago

It is either they are willfully ignorant as we watch habeas corpus and due process erode. Or they are just ostriches putting their heads in the sand.

patcon2• 1 year ago

@dang given that HN is a pretty powerful place, and things read here are what a certain a sort of world shaper will know about:

can you say whether there have been any interference operations by nation-state adversaries to subtly prune content? I wonder whether HN's monitoring tools are robust to detect such things

When I see this being downvoted, it's a field I know well, and it's considered by many to be the best response to the neo-reactionary movement and radical progressive left's division of the political conversation, and perhaps the best hope for unifying a shattered US democratic system.

I can't help but be suspicious of in whose interest it would be to suppress these conversations and ideas.

snapplebobapple• 1 year ago

I'd be ok with this if any tax increase had to be voted on in a referendum with a super majority of 70% voting for the tax increase and if anyone who wanted to participate in the lottery had to post 2 weeks of their average income for the last five years (with a floor at 2 weeks minimum wage) as a bond for the duration of the government and any deficits the government incurred came out of the posted bond first.

It's unfortunate their justification for this is racist, ageist and anti-success though. It's easy to see how 300-400 randomly selected citizens would probably do a better job than career politicians at spending a given pot of money, they would just be much worse at deciding how big the pot of government money should be due to the preference to take from the successful and enrich oneself and one's group.

ClayShentrup• 1 year ago

Yes!!

https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto

delichon2• 1 year ago

Take two political extremists, one believes that taxation is theft, the other that property is theft. The difference could make Kamala and Donald seem like twins. Sortition is a way for either to become decision makers by chance. Whichever is more objectionable to you, could you really endorse a process that would put them in power, as opposed to a traditional election where the extremes tend to winnow out? That seems like a large increase in the risk of getting an extreme result.

AnimalMuppet4• 1 year ago

Sure, that's true - for any one person.

Now take a representative body with 100 members. You get, say, five extremists on the left and seven on the right. The other 88 members basically leave those 12 extremists on the margins, and the extremists become irrelevant.

Now, if extremists (total of all flavors) exceed 50% of your population, you're in trouble. But you were probably in trouble in a democracy, too...

delichon2• 1 year ago

So you endorse sortition for large bodies, but not for an executive or a small committee? What's a reasonable threshold?

We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government (2019)

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