(Re)founding Ep. 1: Terry Bouricius
On democracy beyond elections
Democracy Creative is excited to release (Re)founding, a conversation series on the future of democracy in the United States. We will be regularly publishing video, audio, and text transcripts of interviews with fascinating people imagining more thoughtful, collaborative, and yes, ~creative~ ways to govern ourselves in the 21st century. Our first guest is former Vermont politician, globally renowned democracy theorist, and ballroom dancer Terry Bouricius.
(Re)founded is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
The text of this interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Tevan Goldberg
Hello and welcome to (Re)founding, a conversation series about the past, present and future of democratic reform here in the United States and in the world. It's awesome to be joined today by Terry Bouricius, who is a notable scholar of democratic reform and happens to also live here in Burlington. My name is Tevan Goldberg, and I'm joined by my colleague, Jesse Warren, who founded Democracy Creative in 2019. I joined about six months ago after I answered Jesse's ad for a roommate on Craigslist. Sometimes you never know where that's going to take you.
We wanted to begin our series with Terry for a number of reasons. One is because Terry actually featured on a series of T-shirts that Jesse made before we had even met him, which is kind of funny.
Terry came into our world for real this summer when I also found him on the internet while looking for a piano tuner. So he came over to our house to tune my piano. And as it happens, we share an interest not only in pianos that are in tune, but in increasing participation in democracy and reducing the influence of partisanship and elections in the functioning of our society!
Without (much) further ado, I want to speak briefly about who Terry is, and then get to actually hearing him talk. Terry is maybe best known in Burlington as being the founder of the Vermont Progressive Party, one of the United States’ most successful third parties, which is admittedly not a very high bar - but it has certainly had an effect around here. Terry was an elected official on the Burlington city council, in the state legislature, and an activist, but we know him as somebody who actually is quite concerned with democracy without elections. This may sound like a contradiction to a lot of people.
So Terry, I was wondering if you could maybe just speak a little bit as to why we would want a democracy without elections. How could that even work?
Terry Bouricius
Well, the political science term for what I'm advocating is called sortition. It's not a word that even appears in some dictionaries. But the notion is, it's more like a jury model of democracy, where you take a random statistically representative sample of the population, bring in all the expert witnesses, all the testimony, and let them deliberate – let them hear all the different sides — and make decisions. This bypasses the entire electoral process; the competition which breeds divisiveness, the invention of reasons to attack and vilify other citizens. And it's an experiment.
Actually, using the word experiment is kind of a mistake, because ancient Athens used sortition for the bulk of their policymaking. After the reforms of 403 BC, the citizens’ assembly in Athens said: you know what, we're not going to make laws anymore. We're going to let a random jury of 500 citizens decide yes or no on new laws. Most of the magistrates, the people who ran the city, were appointed in panels of 10 randomly selected citizens. So random selection is the root of democracy. And in recent decades, it's taken off around the world, particularly in places like Europe and Asia and Australia. There have been literally hundreds, probably well over 1000 citizens’ assemblies, groups of randomly selected ordinary citizens brought together, presented with a particular problem, and asked to figure out what is the best thing to do for society. No parties, no politicians, no elections, just true representation.
Tevan Goldberg
And how did you get interested in that originally?
Terry Bouricius
People who know me know that politics has been what I've been about ever since college. I was a founder of various political parties over the years, and a candidate for office many times. I got elected to the city council in Burlington, Vermont in the same election that Bernie Sanders was elected mayor in 1981. I served five terms on the city council, including a term as president of the council, and then I ran for the state legislature a second time. The first time I ran for the legislature I lost by a few votes. But I ran again and I got elected, then served five terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. After I left the legislature, I worked on election reform nationally for an organization advocating things like ranked choice voting, proportional representation, those kinds of reforms. So I was a policy analyst, basically a lobbyist for election reform all over the country.
Interestingly, in that work, one of the things that I did was prepare testimony for the 2004 Citizens’ Assembly in British Columbia, Canada, which was looking at how to reform that province’s voting methods with things like ranked choice voting. The body that was deliberating was made of one man and one woman randomly selected from each district within the province. As I observed this process I thought: Oh my goodness, this is what we should be doing! This is the model that outshines partisan elections, because the fact is, elections fan divisiveness. Partisan loyalties and tribalism end up actually sort of overwhelming genuine deliberation.
That's one thing that I did learn as a politician: deliberation is not something politicians do. Deliberation requires you to have an open mind, absorb new information, and seek the best outcome. Politicians have run on a platform where they’ve made certain commitments. They dare not change their point of view, because then they're called somebody who's flip-flopping, or a sell-out. The goal of politicians is to show that the other side is corrupt, evil or incompetent. Quite frankly, preparing for the next election is what governing is about. To maintain power.
I saw that firsthand in the state legislature. Now Vermont's not a particularly corrupt place, it's not at the height of partisanship. But still, as a politician, when the other side would bring forward a bill on an issue that I knew about, my first priority was to figure out what was wrong with it, and how I could show that the other side was stupid, or foolish, or corrupt, even for proposing that bill! That's what I had to do, because we had to prepare the ground for the next election so that we can maintain power.
Politicians always say, well, if I can't stay in power, then I can't do anything. Staying in power is the most important priority. There's never any deliberation. That debate on the floor is showmanship, it's about presentation. And vilifying the opposition. So ever since I saw the citizens’ assembly in British Columbia, my political work has shifted to promoting sortition, i.e the use of civic lotteries, to create randomly-selected juries of ordinary citizens who make democratic policy decisions, instead of relying on elections.
Jesse Warren
When I talk to people about sortition, or citizens’ assemblies, who have never heard of these concepts, often they're a little skeptical, or very skeptical depending on who I’m talking to, of just choosing people by random lottery. They think you're gonna get so many people who are not qualified to make decisions, and wonder how you make sure that people are actually going to take it seriously and do a good job? That seems to be a recurring concern.
Terry Bouricius
Well, the actual track record proves that ordinary citizens can handle very complex technical issues. Hundreds and hundreds of these have been done in Australia, Germany, Denmark, France, Japan, even in China, in Brazil, all over the world. You're not concerned with the competence of each individual member, you're concerned with the competence of the group as a whole. Politicians, as a whole, include people who are individually very, very stupid, very, very bad. And they include some people who are very, very brilliant and very, very good. Politicians run the gamut, the same as the population as a whole does.
I mean, I can pick out individual politicians and say: this person is very, very stupid and very, very incompetent. I can do that in a citizens’ assembly as well. But the point is, we don't care about the competence of the individual, we care about how the group as a whole works. And there's been a lot of studies to show that the diversity you achieve through a lottery process, through random selection, actually trumps the so-called expertise of politicians.
Now, I should point out that the expertise of politicians is not in the realm of policy. Their expertise is in public relations, and how to win elections. Those do not necessarily go together. Quite frankly, most politicians know nothing about policy. When they're on a particular committee, they learn about that subject matter of legislation. But then it heads to the main chamber, and 8 out of 10, 9 out of 10 members know nothing about the bill they're voting on. They have not studied it, they just rely on the partisan members of the committee. If the committee members say yeah, vote for this, they vote for it. The fact is there's no deliberation, no understanding, no expertise. The expertise that exists might be within their staff, or within the lobbyists who are paid by big money interest to be there. And those people do some real research, but the politicians themselves are not experts.
Tevan Goldberg
So you’re basically saying that instead of relying on people to self-select to become decision-makers, we should bring in groups of regular people, ideally in kind of a representative cross-section of the population, to exercise this decision-making.
Terry Bouricius
That's one of the key things, self-selection bias. In many other participatory democracy things like referendums, people voting whether or not they’re informed is an issue, but amongst politicians it’s even more extreme. Because you have to realize that in the mythology we say: we the citizens have selected these people to lead us, to make decisions. But we only get to choose amongst the people who are first self-selected, who tend to be know-it-alls. There have been studies to show that people who run for office, and also chief executives of corporations, are far more likely to be sociopaths than the average citizen. They're far more likely to be narcissists, far more likely to be egomaniacs. Now, there may be nothing wrong with that, maybe having a bunch of egomaniacs is good for decision-making. But research has so far shown no evidence for that. For example, they find that taller candidates with lower voices are more likely to win elections. But there's no evidence that people with lower voices are more competent at making decisions. So the self-selection bias of politicians is actually a major detriment to the electoral process.
I often talk about my next door neighbor, a woman who does so much for the community. She’s so involved, so engaged, so good-hearted. But she's the kind of person who would never run for elected office. She's excluded. In our electoral system, she will never be involved in decision making, because she wouldn't run for office. We only get people who already think they know everything. And I put myself in this category. I'm very, I'm very opinionated. I think I'm really smart. And I have opinions. But the fact is, when you get a room full of people like that, they can't really deliberate because they all think they already know the answer. That's not a good way of making public policy.
Tevan Goldberg
A lot of the people I meet who are interested in deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies are kind of know-it-alls in recovery.
Terry Bouricius
I often refer to myself as a politician in recovery. Yeah.
Jesse Warren
Another thing that often needs to be clarified for people about citizens assemblies is: what are they deciding on? Do you have a body that is basically replacing the legislature with people chosen by lottery? Is it about a particular issue? How does that work?
Terry Bouricius
There are a lot of systems being used all over the world right now. One of the places I like to point to is the City of Paris, which recently adopted a citizens assembly model. East Belgium adopted a similar model where they have an Agenda Council, made of randomly selected ordinary citizens, who decide on what issues the politicians are not dealing with adequately. The Agenda Council can call a citizens’ assembly on that one particular issue. Then all the expert witnesses and testimonies are brought in, and that assembly makes a recommendation. Of course, the goal is to have them not only make a recommendation, but then to have another jury actually adopt yes or no on that being a law. Almost all the examples right now are yes and no on whether to recommend policy to the elected legislature, which means the legislature is still ultimately in the driver's seat. But that approach has still worked.
People in the United States may have heard a few years ago that Ireland legalized same-sex marriage, and they also legalized abortion. But what most Americans don't know is that the whole process was initiated by a constitutional convention of randomly selected ordinary citizens. Ireland is a Catholic country, and the politicians were really afraid of those issues. They didn't want to deal with things like same-sex marriage and abortion. But a randomly-selected group of citizens said: these are the changes we should do. And those recommendations went to a referendum directly, the politicians just sat it out. Those kinds of reforms were initiated by randomly selected citizens, and not by the politicians.
So sometimes the recommendations go directly to referendum, sometimes they go to a legislative body, there's a lot of ways you could do it. But I like the idea of dividing up tasks. I don't think it works very well to have a randomly selected group of citizens do all the functions that a legislature does, a chamber like the Senate or the House representatives. The workload is so much in a lot of systems that most people can’t commit two years to it. You're gonna get a less representative sample if participants have to keep going in, give up their regular job, et cetera. That's why I like the idea of having one randomly selected body for agenda setting, one for creating proposals through a deliberative process, and then a very short-duration jury comes together to hear the pro and con arguments and make the final decision. That dividing-up of tasks allows the largest and most representative body, which meets for a relatively short duration, to make the final yes or no decisions.
This means that these smaller bodies have a higher workload, and therefore a bit more of an element of self-selection bias, because some people say: “I'm just not going to do that.” That’s okay, because they're not making the final decision. As long as they're a diverse group and have all classes, ages, et cetera represented, then it's okay that they're not fully representative, because a final body is going to make the yes no decision. That's my model, what I call “multibody sortition.” I've written some journal articles about it.
Tevan Goldberg
Yes, we've read some of those, and they're fantastic. You often describe yourself as a theorist for this subject, as opposed to some people who are really in the weeds just trying to make these things happen. Both are necessary. But what I find interesting about your approach is that you're really trying to think this whole thing through to every corner of how we organize society, which can almost come off a little subversive, maybe a little revolutionary, because you’re talking about changes to the authority structure and agenda-setting structure in all these facets of government, which are currently handled by our elected representatives and lobbyists and special interests. Do you think that there is a path to this end goal of having a multibody sortition society? What's going to happen to the Vermont State House?
Terry Bouricius
Yes, there's a path forward. I used to refer to this as my 200-year project. But things have been going so fast around the world that now it's my 50-year project. The goal is to actually supplant legislatures. But a frontal attack is not going to work. People need to see examples of randomly-selected, jury-like bodies being successful before they'll consider adopting it. The strategy I recommend is what I call “peeling.” Peeling away one policy domain at a time.
Let's say there's some scandal or corruption about zoning in your local community. Then the proposal is: let's take zoning away from the city council, and invest all future zoning decisions in randomly selected citizen juries. They will decide what the zoning should be. You're not going to do spot zoning to favor some particular developer because they wanted to do some project here, making all the neighbors upset, but since money changed hands, the corruption occurred. Instead, we're not going to let elected people do that anymore. It's going to be done democratically, through a jury process.
And then some other issue comes up, maybe on a national level. We could look at something like health care. The right wing doesn't trust government bureaucrats making decisions about health care, and the left wing doesn't trust insurance executives and bureaucrats making decisions about health care. But maybe both sides could agree on 500 ordinary citizens coming together, getting all the arguments, pro and con, for all the different ways that you could organize health care. They have no reason to be corrupt, there's no lobbyists, no campaign donations, no future election, they're just doing something that they think will be good for themselves, their family and their community. Let them decide issues of health care.
My idea is you peel away one policy domain after another. The analogy I use is like what happened to the monarchies in Europe; they still exist, but they are powerless. Rather than saying to legislatures that we're going to take away their power and give it to the people, we take away one thing at a time. Congress will still exist, but they're basically just naming post offices. They're doing trivial things, but the important decisions are done democratically, by ordinary citizens in samples that are large enough to be statistically representative of the population.
Jesse Warren
I love that analogy, because it helps put into perspective that the way things are right now is not the way it has to be. When people were living under monarchies, elections must have seemed pretty radical.
Terry Bouricius
If elections are the only alternative to monarchy or dictatorship, then yeah, I like elections better, because you can throw the bums out. But you end up with a cycle of people who are similar, even if they have different policy agendas. They tend to be older, whiter, male-er, better educated. It's not diverse. And as I said, diversity sometimes trumps competence of the usual sort. Yes, elections have become more democratic over time. But it's worth noting that for thousands of years elections were deemed by political theorists throughout the world to be aristocratic or oligarchic. In fact, Aristotle famously said, “the selection of magistrates by lottery is considered democratic; by election, oligarchic.” Elections were seen as the tool for the aristocracy.
Even during the founding of the United States, James Madison wrote that the goal of our constitution was to elect the “natural aristocracy.” They considered democracy to be a problem, that it was mob rule, and would threaten the property rights of the wealthy. Many of the Founders were dead-set against democracy, and they thought only propertied males should be allowed to vote. They would select the “natural aristocrats,” people like Madison or Jefferson, instead of the inherited aristocracy of the monarchies. So they were anti-monarchy and anti-dictatorship, but they were not pro-democracy.
Now over time, the term democracy started being applied to the anti-democratic system that was founded in our Constitution. It became more democratic when they extended the vote to women and to African Americans and Native Americans. There were various reforms that made it more democratic. But it's fundamentally an aristocratic tool to put in one group of would-be leaders over another group of would-be leaders. Ordinary people are not involved in governing themselves, they only get to select which team gets to rule over them. I'm not saying I'm anti-elections, if the choice is elections versus dictatorship. But I'm pro-democracy versus elections, which are not a very democratic tool.
Tevan Goldberg
Wow, so much to unpack there. I find your historical study on ancient Athens very interesting, because we often point to Athens in the Golden Age, the time of Plato and Sophocles, as being the crux of Western culture, for better or worse. And yet sortition, which was their system, and that of other cities in ancient Greece, was almost buried historically. You wrote a paper on the Athenian system of government, and how it could provide a template for today. One of the most interesting things in it was your argument about scale, and how people often deride Athenian direct democracy as only functioning because it was a small city-state. And they restricted the amount of citizens to again only propertied males, although they eventually took away the property requirement. But you argue that sortition is better suited than elections to handling different scales of government, even in the modern era of millions and millions of people.
Terry Bouricius
In ancient Athens, the only thing that most Americans know about is the assembly, the ecclesia of 6000 or more ordinary Athenian citizens, who were mostly laborers. People who worked in the silver mines, rowed the ships, soldiers, et cetera. I'm not using Athens as a model, because women weren’t involved, among other issues. But most people only know of the assembly and don't know that almost all political decisions were actually being made by randomly-selected panels, who were administering the city.
In those reforms of 403 BC I mentioned, the assembly itself revoked its law-making authority and put it in the hands of a randomly-selected jury, which was the only body allowed to adopt new laws. This was called the boulé or Council of 500, which set the agenda and prepared all the resolutions and so on. This was the place where all the deliberation and detail was worked out and presented to the assembly. The assembly was more like a referendum process. But even then, when you look at the assembly, it was 6000 citizens out of a population of maybe 30,000, 60,000 citizens. It was a representative sample of the population. Most citizens were not at the assembly; I'm not just talking about the women who weren’t allowed. Most of these male citizens were not at the assemblies. They were off doing their job, doing other things. It was only a sample.
If you know about statistics and probability, a sample of 6000 can accurately represent a population of 60,000. But it can also accurately represent a population of 60 million. So the point is, the model that they used – except for the self-selection bias of going to the assembly – the statistics of it work just as well for a country the size of the United States as it does for a small city. If you only think about the assembly you think: well, that can't work on a large scale. But the random selection process can work perfectly on a large population. If you get statistically representative samples, several hundred people, you have a pretty reliable sample. So the Athenian model that they actually used, not the one that we learned in third grade, or tenth grade, but the actual Athenian model, works very well on a scale of hundreds of millions of people.
Jesse Warren
It seems like there's been a lot of citizens’ assemblies done in Europe, and you talked about Canada earlier, but very few done in the United States. Why?
Terry Bouricius
The domination of our culture and our politics by money is one of the factors, but the fact is, people here think we’re the oldest, greatest democracy in the world, despite being eclipsed by other democracies all over the world long ago even in the electoral process. In terms of standard of living, life expectancy, in all kinds of ways, the United States lags behind. So it's not really that shocking that it lags behind in democratic reforms as well. There are examples of civic lotteries throughout the world, which have tackled all kinds of issues.
There have been a few in the United States though. For example, in Oregon they randomly select a citizen panel to review ballot initiatives. They have the ability in Oregon to petition to put a measure on the ballot. But voters generally know nothing about what they're voting on. Maybe they've only seen some TV ads, or the big money interests have paid to do a mailing or something like that. They do have a voter information form that they mail out to everybody in Oregon, but it's only got the pro and con arguments, both of which could be lies, right? Because there's nobody to double check, they just argue with each other. So people said: you know what, we're gonna take a randomly selected group of citizens, and they're going to listen to the pro and con arguments, do the inquiry, ask questions, and then write a summary of what well-informed citizens think about each ballot measure. That now goes into the election mailer for all citizens. So that's a small thing.
But there have been other examples. In California recently, there was some city (Petaluma) that was trying to decide what to do about a 99-year lease for their fairgrounds that was coming due. They asked: should we renew it? Should we sell to a developer? Should we put a park there? What should we do with this? A proposal was brought forward to create a randomly-selected citizens jury to deliberate on it. So there are examples in the United States where it is used, but it's for small things, almost always only advisory to the city council or state legislature, or to voters. But the United States is far far behind.
There have been hundreds of these in Germany. The entire country of France, after the Yellow Vest protests, had a series of open deliberations all over the country, and then 150 randomly selected citizens met for months on what to do about climate change. They’ve had similar assemblies on climate in the UK. They deal with all kinds of issues, like how do we integrate arts and culture into community, that was the subject of one, or what do we do about climate change, making long term plans?
One of the biggest shortfalls of the election system we have is that politicians will almost never make long-term plans, because they can only look to the next election. They dare not do things that will be painful in the short term, even if they're essential in the long term, like fighting climate change. Because if they do things that are painful in the short term, they're going to lose the next election. They're afraid that even if they could argue to the citizens that “this is good for you!” the opposition is gonna say “no, they're lying, they're just pulling the wool over your eyes, it’s horrible.” Because of competition, they dare not look down the road. Electoral politics is virtually incapable of making long-term planning. But ordinary citizens can, because they don't have an election to face. They don't have to worry about campaign contributors. That's why climate change is one of the premier issues for citizens’ assemblies.
It's worth noting that it's not just in planning for the future that sortition or randomly selected bodies can play a role. You could also use them to oversee a chief executive. We could, every year, pull together a jury of ordinary citizens to review the performance of the mayor, or the governor, or the president, and decide: yes, this person is doing a good job, keep going, or nope, this person is doing a bad job, they're out of office, we're going to have a new election. Ideally, a random jury would then recruit a new person.
But anyway, the point is, you can use it against corruption. Say you have a police chief in a Mexican city who is thought to be corrupt and in bed with the drug cartels. You can have a random jury remove them. Maybe they don't have the evidence to prosecute them criminally, but you can say this jury has determined that the citizenry has lost trust in you, therefore, you can't do the job. So you can use it for things beyond just policymaking. You can use it for anti-corruption oversight of chief executives. There's a lot of ways that randomly selected ordinary citizens can bring democracy, a government of the people, into fruition.
Tevan Goldberg
Yeah, I can even imagine it working to review events of the past. Has anybody done that?
Terry Bouricius
Well, sort of. You can look at South Africa, when they had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They didn't specifically use random selection, it was self-selection, people would choose to come forward. But yes, I think that letting a randomly-selected citizens jury evaluate what happened on January 6, with the invasion of the Capitol is better than having the politicians say oh, they're biased for, or against, Trump. It would be much better to have a jury of 500 randomly selected citizens do that evaluation. They have no reason to be biased. They're just ordinary citizens doing the best they can.
Tevan Goldberg
I often find myself imagining the people I meet in my daily life, being on assemblies and writing my laws.
Terry Bouricius
A lot of organizations I'm a member of, like a food co-op with thousands of members, have elections. Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates. They write a little blurb response to some questions that were posed to them. But nobody double-checks if anything that they said, even their biography, is actually true. We don't know if they've just said what they think people want to hear, if they have a hidden agenda. We don’t know anything about them. But the only model that we have to democratically run organizations is elections.
If you let a randomly selected group of members come together, maybe they wouldn't be the board of directors, because they don't have the time to do that. But they could recruit a diverse board of directors that has all the skills that are needed. It may not work in tiny bodies. In tiny organizations, elections do work, because everybody knows everybody. But once you get to the point where people don't know each other, elections kind of fall apart as a true democratic tool and they become a tool of aristocracy.
Take the example of an online organization. What if something like YouTube, or Uber, was democratically owned? How would they democratically govern themselves? In an election among Uber drivers, they wouldn’t know each other. But if you take a random selection of all the Uber drivers, maybe weighted by how many hours they drive, or whatever they democratically decide on, then make some random samples from that: you guys are going to select a board of directors, you guys are going to select a chief executive officer. That's a genuinely democratic tool that can allow democracy to function; not only at the governmental level, but also in the institutions.
Jesse Warren
It’s so fun to think about all the things that might work better that way. I could imagine the Electoral College actually functioning well, if the electors were chosen by sortition. And then it's actually sort of what the Electoral College was intended to be.
Terry Bouricius
It’s funny you mention that, because during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, there was a proposal on the floor at one point to use random selection to choose the President. The proposal was not great, in my view, but what they said was: you take a random sample of members of Congress, put them in another room, and they can't come out until they select the President. So there's no deal-making, there's no bribery, because you don’t know who will be randomly selected. It’s like the Electoral College model.
The concept of random selection as an anti-corruption tool to avoid the opportunity for deal-making and bribery, was known in ancient Athens. When they would have a pool of thousands of people who could be selected for any criminal or political trial, they would pick the names the morning of the trial, so no one would know who's going to be on the jury ahead of time. So even in ancient Athens, they used it largely as an anti-corruption tool, not only for representation.
Tevan Goldberg
This raises a question, especially since you talked about incorporating this into Uber or something, which would be great, but – under whose authority are these assemblies convened, and how do you ensure that they're actually run well? I can imagine a scenario, especially if they became more popular, where people would organize them to give things legitimacy, but the actual results of the process might be known in advance, or somehow partisan.
Terry Bouricius
The people who control the agenda, and who control the flow of information to the jury, they're basically in control. If they make sure that all the information is one-sided, then the jury is reliably going to decide what they want. So it's essential that these processes also be democratic. Ultimately, in my view, another randomly-selected group of citizens would oversee the staff. If anybody complains that the staff were being biased, then this randomly selected group can listen to the pros and cons about the staff person charged, and get someone new if needed. If all the staff know that their job is on the line, they have to be impartial, or they're going to lose their job. The key thing is you don't want politicians in control of the flow of information.
In Australia, where they've done a lot of citizens’ assemblies, one tool they've worked on is getting all the outside interest groups on a particular policy issue, two or more sides who disagree vehemently, to form a body to prepare neutral information for the assembly. Factual information about the things they disagree about. These are the things that we will have our witnesses present, and you will have your witnesses rebut them. But we ‘stipulate,’ as a lawyer says, to these facts. So there's models that can be used to make sure that the jury is getting balanced information. But that is absolutely crucial. You can easily imagine a jury being pulled together by some dictator made of “randomly selected citizens.” But who did the lottery? Was it observed? Who prepared the information? You can have a fake citizens’ assembly, so it's essential that every piece of it is transparent and controlled democratically, not by bureaucrats.
Jesse Warren
I was gonna say something earlier, when you were talking about the degree to which this could be expanded to everything in society, not just government – we could create a new form of a corporation, that instead of having an elected board of directors, it would be a Sortition Corp, or something.
Terry Bouricius
Elections have been so ingrained in us, that 99.9% of people assume democracy means you have elections. That is a relatively new invention, a change of the word democracy. It's only 200 years old. It used to mean not using elections! Democracy meant you don't use elections, you use random selection. But now the UN Charter of Human Rights says the right to elect your leaders is fundamental. Both human rights and corporate law say that whether it's the stockholders or the members of a co-op, they’re elected. So we have legal barriers to using sortition that have to be overcome, because until people have heard of the concept, they assume elections are the only way to do democracy.
There's a lot of work to be done right now. If a nonprofit organization wanted to use random lottery selection, what they would probably have to do is use a random lottery to form a body that will then nominate a slate who gets elected. So the election would be perfunctory. The real decision would be when the randomly selected body recruits a board of directors, and then the election just ratifies it. Because of the way the laws are written, not only in the United States, but in many countries around the world, it’s assumed that democracy means you have to use elections. Corporations aren't considered democracies, because the more shares you have, the more votes you get. That's not democratic. But even there, they assume that you're still going to use elections. A for-profit corporation could also use sortition. If it were legal, they could say the more shares you have, the more lottery tickets you have in the pile, and we're going to use a lottery to select a panel that's going to hire a board of directors. So you could use it even in a non-democratic model. But right now, we have a lot of legal hurdles to overcome before it can be used that way.
Jesse Warren
It seems that this model – sortition, citizens’ assemblies, deliberative democracy – is addressing the aristocratic nature of elections, in whatever cultural form that aristocracy takes. But does it address the concerns from the Framers of the Constitution about democracy being a mob? Because unless you have a good mechanism to create a reasonably sized body to actually work through these issues substantively, you leave an opening for that.
Terry Bouricius
Exactly. The fear is that uninformed people will be making decisions. The fear of mob rule. As Madison wrote, the ferment and passions of the ordinary people will cause bad decisions, because they're subject to control by demagogues. What we need is a deliberative group that can focus attention and get information. And that is a valid, reasonable thing. But if you don't have the notion of a random statistical sample, the only way that they thought you could get one, that wouldn't be an inherited aristocracy of hereditary noblemen, was election. They also were under the impression that the Greek democracy was a rabble of the people in the ecclesia, that huge assembly. They didn't focus on the Council of 500. So it is true that ordinary people making decisions when they have no reason to be well-informed, and they don't want to spend the time to be, is problematic.
But the fact is – that is exactly what we have with elections! People who vote, whether it's in a referendum, or for candidates, almost never know much. They almost never know the track record of the incumbent, or what their opponent is proposing, or even what their name is. Maybe they've seen their picture. Maybe they know what party they're in. They use some algorithm, a rule of thumb, for who to vote for. A lot of people vote based on hating one party, and trusting another party more. That's what most of us do in the United States. But there are also a lot of people who say: I don't vote for the party, I vote for the individual. And they also know almost nothing about the candidates.
There was a study that has been replicated at least three different times around the world, where they took photographs of candidates running against each other and showed them to people for less than one second. Which of those faces do you think is more reliable, more competent? And the person selected turned out to be who won their election 70% of the time. People in India were looking at photographs of people in Mexico, so they knew nothing about the case. And they tried it with children, looking at photographs of candidates in other countries. Consistently, the person that they randomly, psychologically selected was the person who won. This means that there are enough people who are voting for the candidate and not the party, influenced by psychological factors they're unaware of, like the fact that people with lower voices also tend to be selected in the same way. Elections ensure that people who are ill-informed will be choosing the leaders. In a jury, we’d make sure they have a learning phase first. In fact, there are even proposals to use lotteries to then elect a legislature, which I don't particularly like, but the least informed way of making decisions is by using elections.
Tevan Goldberg
There's a phrase I’ve heard in this field, called “rational ignorance,” that says It actually doesn't make sense for you to spend all this time learning about issues, because you're one of perhaps millions of people in an electorate. You're just a drop in the bucket. Living in Vermont is funny, because we're a small state with a pretty active political scene, perhaps more so than other places. When the elections come around, there's lawn signs everywhere, and some people I know think for weeks and weeks about who they're going to vote for. And that's good, but it sometimes feels a little silly, because often elections are decided by these much more unconscious factors that we're talking about. I wonder if those who think they're the most responsible people in the democracy are actually the most deluded because they think elections matter!
Terry Bouricius
Anthony Downs coined that phrase, rational ignorance. If you have one vote out of millions, or hundreds of thousands, the chance that your one vote is going to tip the election, one way or the other, is virtually nil. There are elections that are decided by one vote, but they are so remotely rare. Therefore, participating in the election is going to have no bearing on the outcome. There's no rational basis to inform yourself, unless you simply enjoy it.
There are people who know all the statistics for their sports teams, they know all about this athlete and that athlete, they have really strong opinions, and they cheer. Elections are the same thing. People don't like to admit it, but it's not rational. It's an emotional thing that they do, because they get pleasure. People think of voting as a civic duty, as a good thing. And therefore they do it, and enjoy it. They don't get informed because it changes the outcome. They do it just because there's a psychological thing.
But most people don't have that psychology, because most people don't get informed at all. Most Americans do not vote in elections. There are occasionally presidential elections where it gets up above half the population, but in most elections, like a municipal election, if you get 20% of the people to participate, that’s a good turnout. So people who think that it's your responsibility to become well informed, are not well informed. They are, in fact, deluded. Downs also coined the phrase, “the paradox of voting,” because it made no rational sense for people to bother to vote. And yet a lot of people do. It's because there's a delusion that it matters.
Jesse Warren
It seems like most people can't even imagine how to solve this very intractable problem of how to fix elections or actually make democracy work, so we resort to guilting people into voting. Get out there and vote. I’ve learned to be a little careful around talking about current events when I do like recorded interviews like this, because sometimes things can change dramatically a week later. That's happened to me before. But right now there's a ripeness to this, when looking at what happened after the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe vs. Wade. The Left’s response was - well, you gotta go vote. And it's like — we’ve been voting! It's not working, and there has to be something else we can do. That’s always been the playbook of the left, sayin go out there and vote. It's been so hard for people to imagine a different way of making decisions.
Terry Bouricius
I want to be clear, though: it's the system we have right now. While the individual voting almost never makes a difference, if you do it as part of a collective thing, say we are all going to go vote and in total, we will make a difference. Alone I won’t, but because I'm doing it, I'm getting my cousin, we’re all gonna go vote. So I'm not saying don't bother to vote, I'm saying that it's ultimately not a good democratic process. But if it's the only process that you're presented with, the choice is dictatorship or elections, then you should vote. But I don't belittle people who say: oh, I don't know enough about the candidates, I don't think I should vote. A lot of us would say no, you gotta vote. The person who's admitting that they don't know enough about the candidates is being more honest, and more thoughtful than the person who says no, you gotta vote.In Vermont, we vote for offices like Probate Judge and High Bailiff. Nobody in Vermont knows what the High Bailiff does.
Tevan Goldberg
They can recall the sheriff!
Terry Bouricius
Right. But the fact is, we vote for all kinds of offices. We maybe know about a couple of candidates in one or two high visibility races, but there's all these other races on the ballot where we just check our party label. And if it's a nonpartisan election, well, “I always vote for the woman,” or “I always vote for the Irish name,” or whatever.
Tevan Goldberg
It certainly feels like third parties in the United States have always had a hard time breaking into the the duopoly of the two party system. In Vermont, we have the Progressive Party, which you’re obviously familiar with. When you vote in the primary here, you have to pick which party’s ballot you want, even though some Progressives run on the Democratic ballot, and many offices are uncontested or blank on the Progressive ballot. In general I get the sense that third parties are from a time in which elections really felt like they could offer democratic alternatives. Have you completely moved on from all that?
Terry Bouricius
I still put up some campaign signs in my front yard, those kind of things. My 200 year project, now a 50 year project - maybe it will become a 25 year project — is to is to move beyond elections. What we have right now, if it's that or Trump, then - I want to be clear that sortition is not a left thing. I have given presentations on the random selection jury model to right wing libertarian groups and had everybody nodding their head yes because they hate politicians, too. We all hate the politicians, we all think they're corrupt. And it's not that they actually, physically, all are corrupt. But enough of them are that the system is corrupt.
We all have this confirmation bias, a belief that if we could just get other ordinary people in the room and explain to them our understanding of the facts, that they'd agree. You guys probably think that, people watching this video probably think that, and so do the people on the other side of the political spectrum from you. So we all think that ordinary people would agree with us if they just knew what we knew.
That is the magic, the potential of sortition. We can all get behind the model, because we all believe that we are right. And ordinary people would agree with us if they had the facts. That's one of the things that gives sortition so much potential, because we can rally people from all political perspectives. The only people who we can't rally are elected politicians. They're really hard, because they think it’s very important to get reelected. In Australia, where they have the New Democracy Foundation, they've got several former prime ministers on their advisory board, but they're all retired. They're all people who are done with it, they know how horrible electoral politics is. They consider it corrupt. And now they're on a board for sortition. Almost no current politicians are onboard. Current politicians like the idea of setting up citizens’ assemblies to advise them, because there's a lot of things they don't have the time to figure out. There are politicians in many countries supporting sortition as advisory; our goal is to make it decisive.
Tevan Goldberg
That strikes me as one of the biggest potential gulfs in the future of this. In a lot of places, like in Europe, they almost exist to legitimize the sitting government. Emanuel Macron supports citizens’ assemblies. They're not really seen as a threat to the established order at all. And indeed, they make the established order look better, because they’re actually consulting with the people.
Terry Bouricius
Politicians are not very threatened by the assemblies throughout Europe and throughout the world, because they aren't making decisions. Once they start actually making decisions, that will change. But we're at the phase right now of this reform movement where what we need are examples and models. So people can say: “Oh, yeah, I heard of that. They did that in in my aunt's city, they did that to decide a property tax issue.” We need to have examples where it's being done, and people who have seen it work well, before politicians will be willing to say yes.
In Ohio, there's a proposal do a constitutional amendment by petition to create a citizens’ assembly body that can pass laws. They haven't actually started a petition drive. But before they can actually have a chance of passing it, ordinary citizens need to have heard of it. Right now, 99.5% of Americans have never heard of sortition. So we need examples. The early examples are going to be advisory. Even though I don't like that model, it is the best thing we can do right now to promote sortition. A true democracy is where everybody or most people have heard of it and seen it work.
Tevan Goldberg
Certainly. The goal of this conversation series is to hopefully get this going in people's heads, because sortition really is different. It’s not just getting more people to turn out to vote. It's not just anti-gerrymandering, tinkering around the edges of the current system, it really is a completely different path that has not been given a fair airing, I think, in our society.
Terry Bouricius
After serving in the Vermont legislature, for 10 years I worked on election reform for an organization in Washington, DC called FairVote, formerly the Center for Voting and Democracy. I worked nationally on election reform, pushing things like proportional representation and ranked choice voting. I would prepare testimony for legislators all over, in Alaska, Arizona, Vermont. After I saw the British Columbia citizens’ assembly, I spoke to the New Democracy Foundation in Australia about these voting reforms, which they use in Australia. They use ranked choice voting, the instant runoff method, for their House of Representatives, and proportional representation for the Senate. But they were so frustrated with the continued partisan bickering, the money, the lobbyists, that they were trying to move beyond that to sortition. The reforms I had spent 10 years pushing, they were so fed up with that they're trying to get beyond it. So I thought maybe I should just jump over this reform and go straight to that reform. And that's what I did.
Tevan Goldberg
As members of a younger generation — I’m 26, Jesse, you're like, what, 32?
Jesse Warren
Yeah.
Tevan Goldberg
People are always telling me that I'm Gen Z, technically, I'm right on the cusp there. I guess I speak for them, and Jesse speaks for millennials. So yeah, we've got some diversity (laughter).
But anyway, what I've noticed when I talk about this with my peers is that they actually kind of perk up, because we're taking it not as a fault, but as a given condition of the current system, that most people feel apathetic about elections. I would say culturally, younger people in the United States are probably less tied to the civic traditions, civic republicanism, that has so far been the hallmark of American politics since the beginning of political parties.
And we've been raised on the internet, which is like the decentralized platform bar none. So much of our lives already feels networked and decentralized, and based on kind of a democratic ethos of just whatever people like more kind of rises to the top. This reaches a point of crudeness sometimes, when it's just like, likes and dislikes.
Terry Bouricius
There are proposals to go to what they call star voting, where candidates on the ballot are given five stars, one star, three stars. That is an actual reform proposal.
Tevan Goldberg
Yeah, things like that. All that is to say is that I think we're at a moment here where we can just continue to go down the same path that we've been going down, which is the default, and is currently happening. Or we can say: let's try to organize our politics in a way that actually addresses the problems that are inherent in it, rather than pretending like those problems are not at the core of the system, just temporary inconveniences that would be solved if you elected the right people.
And that gives me hope, because at this stage, basically nobody can tell us not to do this. I mean, you reach legal hurdles when you try to say this is eventually going to become the decision-making, agenda-setting authority in our society. But at this point the public — which is this amorphous term we can get into later — is not organized politically in the decision-making structure. So by organizing citizens’ assemblies, you’re not breaking the law, you’re not actually challenging any authority, you're simply organizing what currently exists as a disorganized electorate, and essentially creating a fourth branch of government.
That's why I'm inspired by it. It’s so in vogue now to say democracy is under threat. But that's almost a partisan statement, because what it often means is: Democrats are under threat.
Terry Bouricius
The United States is unique on the issue of climate change being a partisan issue. In most places in the world. It's not a partisan issue. Everybody understands the science. All parties left, right. They're all concerned about climate change and preparing, doing transitions, etc, etc. The United States is an outlier there. Interestingly, in countries throughout Europe, climate change has been one of the issues that have had more citizens’ assemblies called for than any other. Organizations like Extinction Rebellion have made citizens’ assemblies one of their primary reform proposals. That’s because they’ve seen that elected politicians are unable, or unwilling, to make the kind of decisions that need to be made, because they're so concerned about the next election. They're locked into this short-termism that’s going to potentially doom the human race.
We need these kinds of reforms to save humanity. That's a rather staggering realization, that elections are the cause of our current climate crisis. Yes, the Industrial Revolution did it. But the fact is, scientists have known for more than two decades, three decades, that we need to change this right away. And politicians say: we’ll just kick that can down the road, we'll do that the next election cycle. The big climate bill that was passed in Congress this year is better than nothing, but it’s so weak, so limited, it's nowhere near what we need, but it's the best that we can expect from elected politicians. So citizens’ assemblies are deemed by many thoughtful people to be essential for actually saving humanity.
Jesse Warren
A couple of years ago, when I first heard that you had been writing about sortition, I was trying to get this Democracy Creative thing off the ground. It was pretty stunning to me how few people could connect the dots at that point about what you just said, that elections as they currently exist are really the cause of the climate crisis. It's a scary thing to admit to yourself, that if you look at any kind of crisis we're in, it's due in part to the failure of the current design of the system.
Terry Bouricius
Competition and competitive elections almost require, they certainly encourage, false information. If I'm a politician and I say we need to do this, or the sea levels are going to rise this much, we have to do this for our grandchildren, etc, other politicians can just say: now that's a lie. That's not true. They're just trying to manipulate you. They may know they’re actually the liars, but they've convinced themselves. You can't have an honest discussion, because the goal of the politicians is not to be honest. It's to win an election. And the best way to win an election is by lying, saying your opponent is trying to screw you over by raising gasoline taxes. So you dare not raise gasoline taxes, etc.
So competitive elections virtually force the public debate to be mired in lies and misinformation, because the incentives for the politicians are on one side or the other, but always some side. If some side has the truth, the other side has to lie, to beat that down. Elections are what creates this whole miasma of disinformation that we have.
Jesse Warren
And it's not only the public debate, it's also the private debate. It makes it impossible to actually strike a deal with opposing groups, except on rare occasions.
Terry Bouricius
There's also the divisiveness in our country. People who are Democrats think that most Republicans are absolutely horrible people, and most Republicans think most Democrats are horrible people. The siloed information, yes, that's part of it. But they always take the worst example of the other side, and assert that is what they are all like. So the Republican think Democrats are all communists, and the Democrats think the Republicans are all fascists. I'm slightly exaggerating, but not much.
There have been psychology studies that show that when people actually get them in the room together, leftwing and rightwing people, Democrats, Republicans, and actually get them to talk, they realize they agree on a lot of stuff. (Partisanship) is an illusion that the politicians encourage, that’s what they need. It’s what drives voter turnout, the belief that this is the “most important election of our lifetimes.” I've heard that every year I've been alive. And it's always true, because things are getting worse and worse.
Jesse Warren
They were able to do sortition in ancient Athens, but it seems like modern technology will allow this to take a more prominent and complex form if it's done in the right way. Because it'll be a lot easier to run a lottery of all the people in your community fairly, and easier to share the information necessary to make a decision than it was when the Constitution was written.
Terry Bouricius
With all the COVID shutdowns, a lot of citizens’ assemblies continued, but they went online, and they have been developing software for deliberation. But face-to-face has a lot of advantages. There are some advantages for remote as well, like (participants) not having to arrange childcare and get to a town hall on the weekend. They can read the material asynchronously in their free time, then they can go on to the deliberation, even with the kid yelling in the background. So yeah, technology has the potential to make this broader.
But look at what happened with social media; the misinformation, and getting likes as financial rewards. One of the worst decisions ever made was the decision to have everything on the internet be free through advertising, which means driving views and attention. It's very sad what that's done to what could have been a much more powerful, much more beneficial technology.
Tevan Goldberg
What you said about the in-person thing is really meaningful, because there’s this sense that not only is our political process kind of messed up, but there's this “Battle for the Soul of America,” that Joe Biden likes to talk about. From what I understand about citizens’ assemblies that have happened in the US, one of the major takeaways is like: Oh my god, we're able to talk to each other! This illusion has been shattered. That has a lot of symbolic resonance beyond just the policymaking advantages of using citizen deliberation, the importance of actually getting the sense that we don't have to keep digging down into our holes here. There is a different way.
Terry Bouricius
If you go forward to my 200 year plan, or 50 years, whatever, you have a democracy based on ordinary people being called up for a jury. say you got called for the jury to decide what the wastewater rates are going to be for our city. It's your job, you have to go and learn all about it. You wouldn't normally want to learn about it, but it’s your responsibility, and you have to make sure that it's done right. And you get paid.
Every few years, you might get called up for some other jury on some other issue. Politics without the elections, without the competition, it becomes kind of boring. Quite frankly, self-government done well should be kind of boring. Majority rule politics is sort of war without the bloodshed. There's an enemy; in fact, the language we use, “join the fight,” all is about battling. Self-government should be about community and how we get along, and what's the best interest for everybody.
We'll have disagreements, we do have real disagreements in our culture. But most of the ones that get the attention are fake ones that were invented by politicians for the sake of driving voter participation. Like some southern state said: we’re gonna make a rallying cry about (all)-gender bathrooms. That'll get them psyched up. They invented an issue to get people riled up, that none of the politicians actually cared about. Most of the things that we spend our time fuming about were issues that were largely invented by politicians for the sake of dividing us. Even issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, a lot of these issues. People disagree about them. But put them in a room together, they can work out an agreement. It’s when the politicians and elections get in the way, now the (other side) is the enemy. They're either trying to take away all of womens' rights, or they're trying to kill babies. It becomes one or the other.
Tevan Goldberg
That does bring up an interesting point, though, if the goal of this is to create a collaborative, boring democracy, what about sports? Americans love sports. We love wars, we love winning, and our politics resembles sports, as we discussed, both statistically and also in this one team wins, one team loses mindset. And you can only be on one team, really. What do we do with that?
Terry Bouricius
I say more sports. Or we make the politicians fight (laughter).
Tevan Goldberg
You heard it here first, folks.
Terry Bouricius
Or they have dance-offs.
Jesse Warren
I've always viewed the business landscape as somewhere in which that can play out, this competition.
Terry Bouricius
Now we’re moving into (talking about) capitalism, and quite frankly, this reform doesn't need to go there. Once you have representative samples — there’s a famous quote, “the ordinary person may not know how to make a shoe, but they know where the shoe pinches” — if you get ordinary people together, they can say, these are the problems we need to address, let's get all the expert witnesses and figure out a plan. And then we'll evaluate whether it meets our needs or not. There's an argument that you have to solve the issue of profit motivation before you can tackle climate change. And that may or may not be true. I'm not gonna gonna go there in this discussion. But I am going to say that we need to tackle the issue of electoral short-term thinking before we can tackle things like climate change.