Sortition is also much easier to protect from fraud than voting. Generating shared randomness in a way that can’t be rigged is a straight forward well studied problem. For example everyone who wants to take part generates a random value and publishes a public pre-commitment. Then all the random values are revealed, checked against the pre-commitments and xor’d to produce the final random value. All of this can be verified by a member of the public and any member of the public could take part.
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.
These are brilliant ideas. But we do not yet live in a society that is
technologically ready for them.
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.
What are you talking about? No software needed other than a random number generator. After election it's all about identity. We know how to handle identity for hundreds of years already. Thousands even.
Can you provide more detail on how this would actually work or somewhere I can read more about this?
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?
Participants generating numbers are only helping ensure the result is random. You collectively pick a number, and then use that to select a person from a predetermined(!) list (presumably picking a very large number mod the size of the list to get an index in the list).
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.