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.
Thanks for this. This is going to be a nice Wikipedia walk trailhead :)
I'm drawn to randomness as it's elegant, simple and wholesome. By the people for the people and being judged by a jury of peers in court also seemed to suggest a comfort in vesting power to ordinary citizens briefly as needed.
What really sold me is how this would obviate the need for election season polling and the tired prediction estimation and pontification for all those months leading up to elections.
Power and elected office almost certainly corrupts as well. Having brief and rare opportunities to perform this as an honor and duty would bring out the best in people and surface voices and considerations that would better reflect the concerns of the common people.
Idk it just seems like a nicer idea every time i come back to it. Most people here are good people. Yet we're governed by a consortium of the absolute worst (ironically this appears to be completely bipartisan).
Anyways thanks for sharing sortition and it's history here :) this is exactly what I was hoping to find in the discussion and why I enjoy HN
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.)
> 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.)
It's called the SplitLine Algorithm. Here is what 2010 US would look like under it - https://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html - It has some issues. like grouping people who are far apart together. (i.e., someone in rural Colorado gets grouped in with someone in downtown Denver)
I was always a fan of the "compactness" criteria, where you draw the most compact (circle like) districts possible. Like this - https://bdistricting.com/2010/
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
Or just stop radical policies that lays the groundwork for demagouges and populists?
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
> Let's randomly summon citizens to serve brief terms as legislators.
There's a question of supporting families while spouses get called up. One thing that helps a draft is the low percentage of late teen parents.
I'm thinking the terms would be several weeks max similar to jury duty. Families could be sequestered with them and could definitely work around civic pillars like school and harvest or tourism seasons maybe