links:
- https://www.fairvote.ca/open-list-proportional-representation/
- https://www.fairvote.ca/stv/
- https://www.fairvote.ca/mixed-member-proportional/
- Regional Proportional Representation
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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I remain a huge fan of sortition. You randomly pick a bunch of people who are willing (and/or able) to do the job, let guardrails veto some of them, train them and let them cook. An unordered list of things to love:
We already do this for the life-or-death task of juries. We have the technology.
(Second choice is RCV w\ MMP; fairvote does good work.)
I like the sound of it, but I worry that instead of producing the Cincinnatus-types, we'll produce an electorate that is mostly comprised of political hacks who are too entrenched in their views to be able to effectively compromise, because all of the apathetic and apolitical people wouldn't have the will or the desire to take such a role on. It would require a massive cultural shift to encourage people to participate in the system willingly - "Doing your civic duty" is often said about voting, but so few people actually follow through with it because there is friction involved.
Also, special interests might not be able to bribe future politicians, but there's nothing stopping one who takes the job from also getting handed a bunch of "favors" and "gifts" to influence their thinking when voting. Not to defend plutocracies, but I feel like it's a lot harder to bribe a rich politician than it is to bribe one who is working or middle class - if anything, someone who is poor would be more susceptible to corruption, because even a "small" kickback from some corporation looking to get a politician on their side could be a life-changing one for them, one that they could not afford to say "no" to.
But man, wouldn't it be cool to see what society would look like when any one of us could be called up to make decisions for the entire nation? With some effective guardrails and a strong constitution, I could see it being one of the best forms of representation.
There are indeed ways to design it poorly; I'll just point again to juries to say that we know how to do it competently. I'll rephrase the objections in terms of juries (but please note the quotes are from a hyperbolic strawman, and not literally what you said. I hope my replies to the strawman are still useful).
"People who don't care about the particular law/case will refuse to join a jury and they'll all get stuck in endless deliberation" - being on the jury is not always optional! While there are strategies to avoid being a juror, the large majority of folks don't use them. People get real nervous about perjury. Also, we have several levers of control here. Congress salaries+benefits aren't bad, getting an important position might be akin to winning a lottery. Many folks skip voting day because they feel uninformed or are required to work, but we educate jurists and require companies to give time off for their service. Finally, if a jury is stuck we call a new one; by random draw we'll eventually get a lot of all people from one side or the other. Gridlock is only ever stochastic.
"People could bribe the juries for the outcomes they want!" - extremely risky, the state knows who is on the jury at the same time as everyone else, predicting it ahead of time is impossible, and we strongly regulate the interactions of juries + invested parties once they're chosen. Note that we can assign political decision bodies to fairly narrow issues, so managing this at scale isn't so difficult.
The laws are currently written by lawyers for bankers
Changing to a system where laws are written by actual humans instead of demonoid homunculi will alleviate a lot of the pain revolving around the apathy and complexity pain points.
I worry that a lot of it comes from scale. It's expensive/tricky to scale up human flexability; I think I've seen well meaning people design systems they intended to be human, and got much worse results than the lawyers and bankers. There's some skill here.
Start low. Baloon tests cities, work out the kinks, increase the scope, etc. How we do pretty much anything.
Which systems are you referring to?
Administration in non-profits and schools mostly.
Administration has little to do with democracy and everything to do with capitalism.
They have been carving out education dollars to add more administrators over the last 30 years,leading to budgets strained for actual teaching while increasing the amount of bureaucracy.
All this just to ensure the populace doesn't get too smart and start thinking of implementing new systems like sortition and ranked choice.
Administrative costs are high in health care and education (which are not really the US federal government), but I can't find data on this for the labor costs to administrative professionals in government. Source?
Labor costs are high for the federal government, but I thought a lot of that was pensions + regular raises. I don't think these things should be attributed to capitalism run amok.
Virtually every poll shows that around 1/4 to 1/3 of the population are Nazis, so it's only a matter of time before one of them gets picked
Just logging that this doesn't match any data I've seen, unless you take Nazi to be an obscenely broad tent. Sources + definitions required.
Exhibit 1 is Trump's approval rating, currently 36%
But generally most political opinion polls (at least in the US and other western countries) show around 1/3 of responses constantly support literal fascist ideology. It's a block of voters that will not change their minds for anything.
You and me both, there have to be at least dozens of us.
Which, under a sortition vote, would mean we would have a chance!
The upvotes are in! There's at least dozens. 2 dozens.
I like a bicameral system with one assembly being chosen by sortition. Say, expand the US House dramatically, and fill the seats by sortition. I just don't think completely replacing all representatives with random citizens is a great idea. I don't think you can train people to be policy experts fast enough for that to really be viable in a large modern nation.
Maybe fill the Senate by sortition from just lawyers, and maybe past Representatives, so you retain some level of expertise in the legislature.
This is very similar to how we do it with juries; a body of the people to stamp/implement the laws written by congress and rules for reading them from judges. I think it's an improvement.
But I do want to vouch for how teachable people can be. And I think it really changes how we fund/run/manage education when 'functioning in the senate' is a mandatory skill.
As teachable as they may be, legislating a country of a third of a billion people is complicated. How long does it take to teach constitutional law to a layperson? Not to mention the time to teach them the other relevant knowledge to draft functional policy. Do their terms include that education time, or do they have a preparatory teaching period before their term actually begins?
Then there's the issue of installing the teachers themselves. Clearly they can't be assigned by broad sortition themselves. Are they appointed? By who? How do you prevent them from becoming a sort of shadow government, influencing representatives with their own biases and agendas?
I like sortition in principle, but it raises its own questions. Like I said, I like the idea of an upper house randomly selected from those who pass the bar in their states. It's not a perfect solution, but there may be something workable there.
I think I disagree that each group needs to know the full constitutional law. Politicians often have aids for this, and this proposal doesn't need to remove the courts. Let them summon a judge and negotiate the final language, or contract out multiple versions and take public comments.
Similarly for the teachers: in court rooms and congress, they aren't permanent hires. They're brought in by choice of the group (or someone organizing/arguing to the group). In most areas it is not so difficult to find well credentialed experts, who may in turn suggest other people to talk to (or, should any of them seem sus, may inspire a sortitioned member to suggest a critic). If data is bad, congress can get folks to go and collect the data they want in the way they want. When your job is to understand one issue, I think you have the time to consider multiple views and sort through the claims.
shouldn't then the congressional body be that and you just have everyone vote on the laws?
I'm too many levels in and I can't tell which combination you're talking about XD
So I mean congress or parliment or whatnot creates laws and votes on what is ready to send to the elecorate for a vote to pass.
My gut reaction is exhaustion. I would like this if folks had the time, resources, and politicians weren't so tied up in party politics.
If you have a functional legislative arm of government, then it produces too many bits of text for the average person to keep up with it, and it's not terribly efficient for them to try. I don't need to know the particulars of industrial zoning policy, but I do want it to be sensical.
And if the politicians decide to bundle things together, lots of wedging becomes available. This seems less common for single-issue policy juries (one could even constrain their range on creation).
But in RCV and good support: sure. I think it could be made to work.
you could require pacing. no more than one bill at a time. a month for evaluation and on month for continued evaluation and voting so like no more than 6 bills a year and maybe a character limit on the laws to.
Idk if we want to be in a state that can only write ~1000 characters to regulate AI, and that will take at least a 2 month lag?
I mean it does not have to be 1000. Ideally we would have an analysis of laws and determine the size of well made legislation and then further allowed the size to be changed as needed. Changing it should be something like a two thirds vote or such to not make it willy nilly.
How do you determine who is able to do the job
You can do it several ways. Athens had anyone who wanted to from the city meet and interview the randomly chosen folks; if the group disliked them, they were removed from the pot and you drew again. Seems like a good fit when the job is comprehensible, and/or needs community backing. Similar in flavor to senate confirmation of appointees.
In juries, we have professionally licensed advocates and referee's who interview the randomly chosen, and they can reject folks for almost any reason they want. This seems like a good fit when we already have a big body of bureaucrats and managers who will need to work with these folks. Let them do the filtering.
For perpetually rolling positions, give the outgoing folks a small number of vetos on the next draw. They know what the job requires, and limiting the number of objections ensures against corruption.
There's also levers you can pull if we don't have a good way to judge competence. My favorites are to increase the number of people on the panel/jury/group, and provide larger budgets and opportunities for the group to get training. Just as congress (and courts) can pull in industry leaders, expert scientists, and decision makers, these decision making bodies should be able to do the same.
Any popularity based voting system is going to be corrupted. It really is a dumb concept used for obvious control.
I think we haven't tested democracy variations quite far enough. I agree that the first-past-the-post model in capitalism has proven extremely vulnerable to mis/disinformation, and made it possible to benefit from the idiocy of your peers. But I don't think we've seen, say, RCV and proportional representation + robust finance laws prove nearly so bad.
Also, I think this take is disingenuous to the roots of democracy. It is a social technology used for legitimacy in tons of situations by many groups, for a variety of reasons. Often it is neither dumb nor a method of obvious control.
Popularity is a bad concept for representation. We don't need to waste any more time figuring it out.
Natural leaders and the dynamics of unanimous rule cannot to be confused with large scaling elections that don't find or promote these leaders. The system produces obvious garbage once scaled beyond a small group.
Hypothetically if you could have a population perfectly informed without bias they could make a good rationale choice. This is beyond unrealistic as you scale elections though because the information required to make a good decision increases beyond what most humans are capable of.
Much like capitalism, democracy seems only acceptable on a very small and well regulated scale which invariably grows into the monstrosity we deal with today.
Eh - sounds like arguments against centralization of power to me.
Show me a Democratic model practiced on a large scale that has not descended into an oligarchy of corruption.
On the extreme end, Quakers. Consensus is clearly a democratic voting scheme, and they've run everything from churches to universities to states to companies with it.
Why do you think it is so effective for them?
Consensus is quite hard to corrupt by design. You trade off some substantial amount of efficiency, and most groups aren't willing to commit to working towards it.
They believe everyone's got some good in them, and that good will end up getting the important decisions to happen. I note that they don't seem to actually control for this belief all that hard. Perhaps anyone who doesn't believe gets too impatient and moves on.
Yes, I looked it up. A non adversarial voting system based around consensus. This is similar to a system I strive for in my workplace.
Thanks for pointing this out, while extreme it does offer some good insight especially for someone who is over the first past the post system like me.
I like the idea of adding a lottery option to some sort of ranked choice. I'm perfectly fine electing good politicians, but if a majority of people think they're corrupt, we should be able to rank a lottery option above them.
I'm fine with re-running if the chosen person opts out, but I don't like the opt-in versions. I'm also not fond of some of the statistical biasing some people advocate with the system -- a straight lottery where everyone has equal odds. I'd compromise on including felons, but personally I think including them incentivizes rehabilitation.
I also worry that this effectively gives power to public servants who are not necessarily good people -- wasn't Stalin originally a secretary? I can see every think tank offering up people with their own agendas to work in a new office but having an established office with entrenched interests also seems super dangerous.
Oh that's fun. I like this, but you really need that RCV to avoid vote splitting. I wonder if it's better off as approval? Strategic voting around a sortician option would be very weird.
Cause RCV for a sotrician option is, statistically, likely to pick a moderate voter who leans towards the thing you dislike. There's something anti-inductive here.
When voters are required to rank every candidate vote splitting isn't an issue. This is actually easier when there is a lottery rank because you can make a default ranking as equal to (or below) lottery, then just pull people above or below. Strategically, I think the lottery option is more a "candidates below this rank suck" option, which forces politicians to be at least better than random citizens from the perspective of most citizens.
I made a top level comment on this too.