Better Than Election Reforms

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 12.2

Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash

This section may not be worth having in the book, or could be moved to an appendix along with chapter 4 on why election reforms won’t be sufficient. Feedback on the value of this section are welcome.

Using sortition for the crafting and review of legislation, and separately for final adoption, offers many benefits over election. The electoral problems below have been addressed in the foregoing chapters. But the inadequacy of elections does not automatically show that sortition would perform better on each point. While I addressed many of these problems in chapters 4 and 5 (about election reforms), the summary below shows how sortition digs out and eliminates each  problem at its root. As I mentioned in the Introduction in chapter 1, the transition to sortition is unlikely to be sudden, and elections and sortition will likely exist side by side for a time. This will weaken the sortition solutions to various degrees during that transition. But this book is intended to be a “North Star” showing the direction democracy needs to go.  So, the discussion below is about the impact of sortition at the end point, or when elections are merely a vestigial remnant. I will discuss ideas about how the transition to a sortition-based democracy might work in the final chapter of this book.

Representativeness

The ability of random selection or scientific sampling to generate a far more descriptively representative body than elections is self-evident, and confirmed by hundreds of sortition implementations. This representativeness may not be perfect, but will not be symbolic or token -- but deep. In addition to mirroring the gender, race, age, income, and ethnic makeup of the community; the values, life experiences, class, religious beliefs or lack thereof, occupations, political philosophy, cognitive style and interests will also be a far better match than in any elected legislative chamber. This result is dependent, however, on either extremely effective stratified sampling, or the use of quasi-mandatory service (as with jury duty in many jurisdictions). The risk of self-selection bias in non-mandatory mini-publics, in terms of personality and cognitive style, means that more research still needs to be done on the effectiveness of stratified sampling. Unfortunately, such research using parallel mini-publics, where some are drawn using stratified sampling from those willing to serve, and the others having quasi-mandatory service, could only be conducted by a government with statutory authority to compel participation. Regardless, the accuracy of the representativeness would be be dramatically greater than any elected body. Such a mini-public would be, as John Adams described an ideal legislature in 1776,

“an exact portrait of the  people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them.”

It should be noted, however (as I discussed in chapter 7), that descriptive representativeness was not a goal of electoral systems. Elections were based on the aspiration (or fantasy) that elected “representatives” would be superior men, with civic virtue who were authorized to rule on behalf of the people.

Campaign Finance and Lobbying

Obviously an absence of campaigning eliminates the elitism filter and corruption problems associated with raising campaign funds. While public campaign finance reform could make some headway against the more egregious corruption that borders on quid pro quo vote buying, that reform cannot overcome the continued opportunity for wealthy interests to make independent expenditures to sway election outcomes and buy influence. Under a sortition system, independent expenditures could theoretically still be made, but would need to influence the public in general on topics where a jury is likely to be called. But such expenditures would be dramatically less efficient and less effective for wealthy spenders than traditional campaign spending. In an electoral campaign situation, with voter rational ignorance, there are standard advertising methods to turn enough ill-informed swing voters to affect the outcome. If applied in a sortition context, however, this sort of superficial persuasion would be negated by the intensive learning and focused attention fostered by being in a relatively small randomly-selected decision-making group, presented with a broad range of information. A society might decide that once a jury is called, such legislative juries should be sequestered as a defense against jury tampering (lobbying), as is often the case in criminal trials. It is helpful to use an analogy of a traditional court trial. Imagine if jurors and judges solicited and received contributions of money from the prosecutors and defense team in a trial, and had private meetings with them outside of the official court proceedings. That is the situation we have in our existing legislative process, where elected legislators serve effectively as judges and jurors, but on matters of policy rather than guilt of innocence (hark back to the argument of Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10 quoted near the end of the previous chapter). Sortition can eliminate such brazen corruption.

Gerrymandering

Obviously, all problems related to gerrymandering would disappear in a system based on sortition rather than election. Gerrymandering functions to block any hope of getting an accurate sample of representatives. Even if carried out with no corruption, the very existence of district boundaries means that the non-random nature of like-minded people tending to live in neighborhoods together (the “big sort”), means that geographic district lines will usually generate non-representative outcomes. Multi-member districts using proportional representation voting methods can reduce the effects of gerrymandering, but sortition eliminates it completely. With no elections there are no district lines to be drawn and gerrymandering cannot exist. The analogous challenge for sortition is the creation of a scientifically accurate and publicly transparent random selection procedures. 

Voting Machine Fraud

Unlike the tallying of elections it is much easier to ensure honesty in making random selections than in processing votes. The difficulty for transparency in elections is that each vote not only needs to be accurate but also anonymous (to prevent vote buying). Creating a random list of citizens involves no such double bind, and can be conducted 100 percent transparently and verifiably. While sortition could theoretically rely on computer generated lottery selection, in order to promote trust in the integrity of the system, like the push for paper ballots in elections, it makes sense to use a more transparent simple system for generating lists of selected citizens.  For example, every eligible citizen could be matched to an arbitrary but unique number. This list could be made public prior to any random drawing. By using a combination of any two unpredictable numbers (there are an infinite number of options, for example, the decimal digits of barometric pressure on a particular public digital barometer at a specific time as a starting point and selecting every nth name from this list, where n is the total on thirty dice rolled at a publicly viewed event.)

For stratified samples, there are more complications. The common current practice for most citizens’ assemblies is using some computer program to randomly generate a huge number of potential panels, each of which satisfies the demographic quotas. These potential lists can all be made public before the final random draw of just one of these panels to be the official sample. Again, this final draw should be done in a public and verifiable manner.