What are your thoughts on sortition?

Yes. Like jury selection. However where would the lawful evil wannabes go? Maybe instead of replacing the current situation we can add another layer to governing. We could have judges from the same way. Fun question. Thanks for sharing.

Jury selection was my first thought too. As I personally don’t feel judges are moral, I would not agree with random selection.
Unfortunately, I don’t have some nice “better” idea, but the current US system has terribly wrong flaws. The flaws have further implications on almost every other part of a democracy’s chances of being part of a beneficial system, for said country.

I can just imagine how sortition would work if I had a huge very complicated business and chose a random person to run it. Talk about crash and burn, oh my!

This may be a good idea, but since there is no way a few individuals could reap great financial gains under such a system it would never be allowed to come into existence. Their current wealth would be used to manipulate the citizenry playing upon fear and existing prejudices (as they are doing now) to prevent it.

First thought: What the hell is sortition?

Second thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Third thought: Huh, wiki says it’s a synonym for demarchy, which should not be confused with démarche.

Fourth thought: What the hell are demarchy and démarche? Never mind. Read about sortition.

Fifth thought: Surely someone by now has done some studies or computer simulations or something. All I see on the wiki page for pros and cons are a bunch of qualitative, abstract guesses. I’d like to see some hard results on sortition and all the other electoral processes, so we could talk about pros and cons in terms of how it works out in practice. The article talks about different bodies that use the method, but it doesn’t comment on how well it works for them.

Sixth thought: it doesn’t matter what electoral system we use. There are far too many of us not paying attention, not informing ourselves, not thinking critically, and sitting around on our asses while our president shows us his real reason for draining the swamp: so he could build high-rise luxury alligator condos on it.

Seventh thought: nah, we’re screwed. There’s an ancient Chinese curse that translates to something like, “May you live in interesting times.” It’s about to get interesting.

Oh, about politicians doing a bad job, and complex decisions. The thing is, our politicians in the US are doing a great job making complex decisions. But they’re doing it on behalf of their rich masters, not for us, the people they promised to serve.

A fair, equal odds procedure, but not really in the best interests of those involved, since random, unknown ideas may not be agreeable to all parties when the selection has been completed.

@SaganRitual, that about covers it. Somebody wished me that “interesting times” curse once when I was about 14 or 15, so I guess this is all my fault.

Further thoughts: When times get as interesting as this present (even though they may end up just being a boring blip on a world history wall chart), people either usually knuckle under and stay down, incidentally becoming ripe for conquest by another force, or knuckle under until they break, have nothing to lose, and then rise up. Do you think we still have it in us, the rising up?

Without a unifying and uplifting ideal, how could we? Our unifying and uplifting ideas have been trashed. People’s willingness to die for strangers, any strangers, even those in the next block, never mind for a philosophy, is pretty severely compromised.

Anyway, who that has come through our educational system can even read Common Sense any more?

And who, I wonder, would support “us-the-people” in revolt while the looters scuttle in? Or would everyone just be looters—the Arabs, the Germans, the Canadians, the Russians? The French, whose key to the Bastille is still displayed at Mount Vernon? Do we have any friends left? We couldn’t even count on our own fellow countryfolk, who would ask, like gang members, if we were wearing red or blue.

Sortition: It sounded uncommonly good to me even when I first read about it, and that would be in high school, when a popular young guy, now long dead, was president. Right now it sounds superior. The only problem is—some people instantly lose their common sense, their common values, and their common touch the moment they become Somebody Special. They see themselves being afforded the privilege and status they’ve been envying on TV all their lives, and it goes to their heads. The risk is that as soon as they’re selected, they stop being random and start being elite. People who weren’t born to it are much worse at handling it than people who were. How do we combat that?
 

The question calls to mind the famous 1963 quotation by William F. Buckley:.
I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

The rest of that page is worth reading, incidentally. If conservatism today looked more like it did when Buckley defined it, it would be much more attractive to a lot of people.

I would certainly prefer random people to the current corrupt corporate pawns who hold most our elected positions.

Especially if you had some smart people design it so really awful and/or crazy people don’t accidentally get to run anything, either by selecting them out, or by having enough ways for sane people to counter unacceptable actions by a few. See for example the sociocracy system.

Also vital would be a way to protect the people in office from becoming corrupted by very wealthy & powerful people using their wealth & power to bribe/threaten/coerce/etc the randomly-selected people in office.

I would be more apt to trust the
scheme in the hands of a population where civic education is emphasized in the
rearing of its children. I suppose we can all take heart from the fact that such traits as altruism and idealism persist even today, but the intractable problem of divorcing power from ambition seems only to intensify. While sortition may appear (superficially) to solve the interminable problem, the mechanics of implementing the setup are more foreboding than than the odds against the scheme working if in place.

@stanleybmanly How about if everyone interested in running for the sortition lottery had to pass a test or three, and the selection were from those people?

@Jeruba You’ll notice that Buckley chose the faculty of Harvard to denigrate in preference to the team fronting his alma mater.

@Zaku There’s the problem once again. How to obtain viable government, yet avoid a ruling elite?

@stanleybmanly, I do, yes. When I first read that quote (decades ago), I was living in Cambridge—same telephone directory as Boston—and I thought, well, um, that would be my neighbors (either way), and I’m just not so sure.

I believe that’s the reason why I actually read some quantity of pages in the phone book. I was trying to picture them as people, not just names, and imagine what a random selection of my peers might really be like. (That’s also how I happened to find a listing for Bilbo Baggins in the Boston phone book.)

That phone book would be disproportionately loaded with the educated elite.

Right. Southie, Roxbury, Dorchester, Somerville…that’s the elite, all right.

@Zaku “How about if everyone interested in running for the sortition lottery had to pass a test or three, and the selection were from those people?”

Likely classes of people would be excluded by such tests because of intentionally designed biases. To benefit a select political perspective, laws have been and are being established to limit who can vote.

@Bill1939 It would depend on what the tests were like, and what prep classes/materials were available. (Of course, the tests and study materials themselves could become a target for political nonsense, and I may be hoping for a higher level of maturity, good intentions and competence than our nation can muster at this point.)

@Zaku may your optimism be realized.