
Sortition - ovulator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
======
turbinerneiter
There is a great book on that matter: Against Elections: The Case for
Democracy from David Van Reybrouck

It argues that it would be better and more democratic to randomly sample
parliament instead of voting. It also describes how a transition could look
like and how mixed systems could work.

The biggest issue I see is that such a system would need a very strong and
well-designed bureaucracy and very well educated and moral public servants.
You would have a state run by technocrats, who prepare options for decisions
that the randomly drawn parliament would need to make. These technocrats could
get all-powerful quickly.

~~~
bonoboTP
Just imagine the value of the industry popping up to "explain" things to the
confused random people in parliament. It would take lobbying to a whole new
level. At least the current ones are weary and cynical and have their wits to
understand how money talks and what's up, who wants what when they say
something etc. Maybe some are naive in certain areas like tech, but I'm pretty
sure random people would be like dropping sheep to the wolves' den.

The idea of neutral impartial helpful technocrats guiding them sounds
wonderful but I'm not sure it would play out like that.

~~~
not2b
That's pretty much what has happened at the state level in the US because of
term limits: the lack of experience produces a gap that is filled by
lobbyists, who wind up writing the laws, because the rookie legislators lack
the experience to draft complex legislation. The lobbyists are often former
lawmakers who have sold their services to some wealthy industry or company.

------
amalcon
I'm glad the Wikipedia summary ends with this line:

 _Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common
law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with
political advisory power (citizens ' juries or citizens' assemblies)._

People reading this are likely familiar with the use of sortition in jury
selection. What is probably the single most well know thing about sitting on a
jury?

 _It sucks._ It's somehow boring and stressful at the same time, and the pay
is very much token. Therefore, most people try to get out of it, with varying
degrees of success. People have gone as far as not registering to vote in
order to avoid jury duty. This is specifically why voter rolls are not used
for that in many places.

The corollary to this is that juries aren't actually a random sample: people
getting out of jury duty obviously causes selection effects. If the sample is
not random, you lose a lot of the theoretical advantages of sortition. Unless
we take strong steps to make sitting in a legislative body _not suck_ , I see
no reason it would be any better there.

~~~
ccffpphh
I mean - ruling should suck. It shouldn't be an attractive position. Our
rulers should be those that want to do good for the people, not because it is
a comfy gig with lots of fame and de facto billionaire status.

~~~
notahacker
If you want rulers to be selected on the basis of ambitions to do good for the
people, eliminating any form of popular approval in favour of random selection
is highly unlikely to be your best choice.

And the more uncomfortable you make it not to opt-out, the more you'll select
for people who've figured out a strategy to benefit from all that power
despite the lack of officially sanctioned perks.

------
keiferski
I've always thought that sortition should play a greater role in democratic
systems, as a counterbalance to the flaws of voting, namely: _the ability of
money and power to influence elections_ and _the advantage that charismatic
people have over uncharismatic ones._ Technology plays a pretty big historic
role here, too: there are definitely American presidents from before
radio/television that wouldn't have _become_ presidents if they ran today.
E.g. some of the Founding Fathers were fantastic writers but awful public
speakers.

Edit: adding some more details:

 _Yet for every Washington or Adams, there is a Thomas Jefferson — a president
who was such a bad public speaker that he declined to deliver a State of the
Union address to Congress, instead beginning a century-long tradition of
sending congressional members a letter..._

[https://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/standardamerican/presiden...](https://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/standardamerican/presidential/voices/)

~~~
mc32
Uncharismatic people don’t do well even if elected.

GHW Bush was uncharismatic but won and also was ineffective at much. I mean,
what did he do effectively?

Come to think of it, at least back to Carter, VPs seem to be quite
uncharismatic. Ford on the other hand was more charismatic than Nixon.

~~~
PaulHoule
GHW Bush's crew planned for the first Gulf War in the early 1980s, designing a
"rapid deployment force" that could occupy Saudia Arabia if something went
down in the Persian Gulf.

Saddam Hussein was deep in debt and heading for an appointment with the IMF.
Much of that debt was owed to Kuwait and he figured that annexing Kuwait would
clean up his books from the Iran-Iraq war. He told the U.S. Ambassador that
much; she said nothing in reply, went home to inform the Pentagon. Saddam took
that as a "yes".

Bush put together a large coalition, established a lot of legitimacy, and
ultimately won the war, and sent the troops home to a ticker tape parade.

Bush ended the "Vietnam Syndrome", completing the rebuilding of the military.
CNN didn't show you the four days of nonstop ground combat that traumatized
veterans who experienced the same mental health symptoms as Vietnam vets.

(You might think Bush and the CIA are evil, but up to this point, his team GOT
THINGS DONE)

Saddam Hussein tried to blow the ex-president up when he was visiting Saudi
Arabia. He took it very personally and so did his son -- that's why GW Bush
was in such a hurry to attack Iraq after the Sept 11 attacks.

That war was a mistake to begin with, but in retrospect the Bush crew make big
mistakes in the "nation building" phase - Don Rumsfeld for instance would be
compared favorably to Robert McNamara except that he went along with Gulf War
II.

~~~
mc32
Hmm interesting write up. Taken at face value, it would appear he was a
capable bureaucrat (could get things fine within a system), but as a
politician he was lacking. Which I guess makes sense.

Politicians have to compromise and made deals with the devil and other things
which require good rapport even with those you disagree with. They also need
to sell their ideas to people and have them accept those ideas. Bureaucrats on
the other hand just have to work well within a system. There are similarities
of course, but I think one of them requires more agreeability and charisma
than the other where procedure and connections are more important.

------
tialaramex
One argument against sortition is that you might occasionally get someone who
was hopelessly unsuited to the job, whereas, proponents of conventional
elections might argue - their system would obviously never do that. But now we
know they're wrong, so that's one more reason to consider sortition.

~~~
frenchy
That's painting it more black and white that I think it is. Proponents of
elections won't argue that their system will always produce someone suited for
the job, just that it will produce the person much the electorate believes is
suited for the job.

The big difference is probably that a proponent of elections believes that the
masses have a better idea of who is suited for that job than random selection,
and proponents of sortion disagree.

~~~
nine_k
Voting would make so much more sense if it wasn't a dumb "first past the
post". It has a ton of downsides, like increased partisanship (if not outright
hostility) and voting not for people who you think are suitable but for the
least bad people who, as you think, have a chance to be elected.

The only reasonable voting system known to date is preferential / Condorcet
voting. It's successfully applied e.g. by the Debian project.

~~~
tialaramex
The huge upside to First Past the Post is that the electorate definitely
understands why their candidate lost the election because it's so simple.

The purpose of Democratic elections is not something like "good government".
We haven't the faintest idea how to do that. What elections do for us is
enable bloodless transitions of power. The useless idiots currently in power
can be voted out and you can replace them with the useless idiots you want to
be in power instead if you can get enough votes. Will they be any better? Well
of course you hope so, but the one thing I'm sure of it is that fighting a
civil war over it would be _worse_.

So the problem to think about isn't "Which electoral system best satisfies
Arrow's conflicting criteria in my opinion as an educated person who has spent
a lot of time thinking about it?" but "What ensures the people who voted for
Bob not Alice will accept that Alice won?".

If you're choosing a single person like the leader of your Executive or
something equally consequential democratic elections are (along with
sortition) one of the least terrible of the bad options you have, and
complicated mechanisms like the Schulze method you're talking about are likely
to mean losers are defiant so they're probably the wrong choice compared to
First Past the Post or other simple methods.

If like Debian you're basically just picking the head of a club, it's scarcely
matters how you do it, Schulze seems over-complicated to me but it's just not
a big deal. Having democratic elections isn't important for this purpose
anyway - nobody is going to kill and die for Debian leadership otherwise, but
knock yourselves out.

~~~
andrewflnr
All good points, but the US is still in bad shape with regard to
understandability of results. The electoral college makes it routine that the
winning candidate is voted for by a minority of citizens. The fact that we
still have bloodless transitions indicates to me that the risk you raise is
overstated. I think if it was replaced with something like ranked choice we
would see an improvement in both desirability and understanding of results.

------
MaxBarraclough
I'm reminded of how lottery voting, a.k.a. random ballot, is immune to any
kind of tactical voting. [0] Either your vote counts for nothing (the most
likely outcome), or it is the only vote that matters. Either way, you just
vote for your favourite. See also [1].

I suppose it may also have the effect of reducing incentive to compromise, as
well as the obvious effect of opening the door to fringe candidates.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem)

------
visarga
A great advantage of sortition is that it removes the need for campaigning and
political parties, so the lobbyists have nothing to grasp on. Another one is
that it is scalable - if you have 10 separate issues, you can draw 10 groups
to work on them.

~~~
est31
> the lobbyists have nothing to grasp on.

There are a few court districs where the big IP fights in technology are being
fought. In those districts, there is tons of lobbying by tech companies to
make create a positive image of them in the local community's mind.

[https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-
built-t...](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-the-
only-outdoor-skating-rink-in-texas)

If more power is given to sortition, companies will do more of those kinds of
things. In fact, I think that a component of the big-name-college-favoring
GAFAM selection practice is due to them wanting to _bribe_ upper-class
America. If one of your family members works at one of those companies, you
have a much different opinion on them.

------
dredmorbius
Michael Schulson's 2014 _Aeon_ essay, "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose
Randomly", is an excellent exploration of this concept:

 _... Above all, chance makes its selection without any recourse to reasons.
This quality is perhaps its greatest advantage, though of course it comes at a
price. Peter Stone, a political theorist at Trinity College, Dublin, and the
author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making
(2011), has made a career of studying the conditions under which such
reasonless-ness can be, well, reasonable._

 _‘What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of
decisions,’ Stone told me. ‘Lotteries guarantee that when you are choosing at
random, there will be no reasons at all for one option rather than another
being selected.’ He calls this the sanitising effect of lotteries – they
eliminate all reasons from a decision, scrubbing away any kind of unwanted
influence. As Stone acknowledges, randomness eliminates good reasons from the
running as well as bad ones. He doesn’t advocate using chance
indiscriminately. ‘But, sometimes,’ he argues, ‘the danger of bad reasons is
bigger than the loss of the possibility of good reasons.’ ..._

[https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-
ran...](https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly)

------
riffraff
Oh, seeing Venice mentioned here does not do justice to how weird the process
was: 10 steps at each either enlarging or reducing the number of people
involved, all to prevent a single family from controlling the outcome (but
still allowing negotiations to happen at every step, apparently).

[https://constitution.org/elec/venetian_selection_system.html](https://constitution.org/elec/venetian_selection_system.html)

------
eqvinox
I really like calling it "Demarchy". Mostly because I came upon this by
reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels (which use the term with a
somewhat different meaning, everyone is continuously polled through cybernetic
implants. But that's just an extreme form of sortition IMHO, by "randomly
choosing everyone".)

~~~
breuleux
> But that's just an extreme form of sortition IMHO, by "randomly choosing
> everyone"

I don't know, I think they're pretty different. The main point of sortition,
the way I see it, is to pick a small subset of people to focus on a problem.
You can't ask "everyone" to focus on every issue, it's way too much work. No
one would be able to do anything else. Reducing the set of deciders to a
manageable size, while being statistically representative of the whole, is the
whole appeal.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> You can't ask "everyone" to focus on every issue, it's way too much work.

Once upon a time, the US Constitution made a point of saying that Congress
must meet at least once a year, whether they have business or not. Because it
seemed, at that time, entirely plausible that they might not have that much
work to do.

------
tomtomtom777
The most powerful in-between solution is to randomly select a ballot per
electoral district instead of a constituent.

This gives the best of both worlds of electoral districts and popular voting:
Everyone is locally represented but the national representation is neatly
distributed over ideologies instead of having just two parties.

As the most import benefit, it completely removes the incentive for strategic
voting.

------
ajb
A lot of people are scared of sortition because they are worried that the
average person is not up to it - but I think there are ways round that. The
best property of sortition is that it prevents clique influence on the
selection of representatives. This can be preserved in systems which combine
sortition with other mechanisms, for example:

\- arrange for the electorate to be formed into groups of 100..200 however
they wish.

\- each group elects a candidate

\- representatives are selected from the candidates by sortition.

This has two beneficial features over pure sortition:

\- The electorate has the opportunity to weed out unsuitables

\- Learning is still possible (if some rep is manifestly unsuitable, the
lectorate can resolve to select no-one like that in the future)

(Allowing groups in the range 100..200 makes it simpler to form the groups,
because once a list reaches the upper bound it can split into two, allowing
everyone to just join the group they like rather than the last % having to
scramble for a place).

~~~
neuland
I think this would have the interesting effect of strongly incentivizing
people to form a group with other people that share their political views.
Kinda like a micro-party. And I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

------
baggy_trough
America would be better governed if House elections were replaced by drawing
1000 randomly selected citizens from the census list.

~~~
gberger
How so?

~~~
MaxBarraclough
It would have the effect of ending 'political aristocracies', where there are
whole families of politicians across several generations. It would also reduce
the distance between politicians and ordinary people.

It would also prevent anyone accumulating years of political experience before
assuming office, though, which seems like a serious drawback.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> It would also prevent anyone accumulating years of political experience
> before assuming office, though, which seems like a serious drawback.

Yes, that's a drawback, but it has an upside. It would prevent any
representative from having been a politician for years, so they'd be there to
represent the people, not to further their political careers.

If you look at Washington as a whole, it seems rather clear to me that the
long-serving politicians are more focused on continuing to get elected than
they are on actually representing their people.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Sure. The question then is how important political experience is.

~~~
_0ffh
Especially when the lion's share of said experience apparently boils down to
raising campaign money from donors.

------
corpMaverick
This is how I think it should work.

Electors are picked randomly for every election. Lets say 50 for every house
seat. They are sequestered like a jury for several days. They listen to every
candidate, they (may) deliberate in private, they vote, until they have
choice. Then they are dismissed. The chosen candidate holds the seat for three
years and votes to choose a head of government.

The advantage is that there are no campaigns, less money involved, less 30
second ads, electors are given the time to focus on every candidate.

~~~
notahacker
Why would electors who have spent their entire lives being responsive to
campaigns and parties suddenly strip off their partisan blinkers when
assessing the red team and blue team candidates?

All you're really doing is barring the vast majority of the population from
political participation and ensuring close races are determined by lottery
rather than actual popularity and differential turnout, which [absent
effective voter suppression] is a strictly worse method.

------
based2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_convention_for_ecolog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_convention_for_ecological_transition)

"For the first time, a panel representative of the diversity of French
citizens, will be directly involved in the preparation of the law."

[https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/en/](https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/en/)

------
hckr_news
Interesting idea. One thing I will point to is that in the Euro Champions
League, they randomly draw small plastic balls with the names of teams inside
it to set up fixture match ups. People still regularly question whether its
free of tampering because one could use heated or rough edged balls
influencing which ball is chosen by the person making the drawings, in this
case for a more favorable match-up for a team.

------
baryphonic
I'd be in favor of sortition in the US for the House of Representatives, as
long as we increased the size to 5-10k members.

------
nickpinkston
Remember this is essentially how American jury pools are selected - of course
with the lawyers having some rejection powers.

------
donw
I believe this is how elections were held in Athens, with eligible citizens
being selected for office via first a vote, to limit the number of candidates
to a hundred or so, and then a random draw.

~~~
dudul
It was. But the key thing in Athens Republic was not the sortition itself, but
the controls put in place to guarantee that "chosen" representatives were
doing a good job.

Being chosen after sortition was _not_ a fun thing, it was a heavy burden to
bare. Representatives were held accountable for their decisions. Their private
life basically became public to ensure that they would not be bought by
"lobbys".

A lot of people are usually taken aback by sortition because they think the
goal is to randomly pick a dictator. They are still representatives, and with
not a lot of power actually. The people in Athens were still voting their laws
directly.

------
34679
Relevant Federalist Paper #10:

[https://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm](https://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm)

------
dilap
I would love to try this for SF govt.

------
k__
Would this even work with a parliarment?

If you got 500 people randomly selected, could they even decide anything?

~~~
317070
The common example for the "would this even work as a parliament" is the EU
parliament. It has 705 seats, and is filled with people coming from ±150
different parties:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_political_parties_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_political_parties_in_Europe_by_pancontinental_organisation)

It has a very performant track record. It is not organised as your typical
parliament, and has a lot of structure to make this work, such as organising
in groups which mostly bridge elections.

Of course, these are mostly seasoned politicians. But I reckon a similar
structure would work for a sortition based parliament.

------
asawfofor
Maybe as a political party, whose members change every two years?

------
jeffdavis
Would there still be an independent judiciary?

