Originally published at: Could a random lottery solve the sociopath problem in American politics? | Boing Boing
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Betteridge’s Law…
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Yeah with a lottery you’re taking a chance that you’ll end up with someone worse.
As bad as the odds are in the big lotteries, someone still does win, very unlikely things happen all the damn time. Feeling lucky that the one-in-300-million-chance isn’t going to select MTG or Steve Bannon or that crank at work that makes everyone around them miserable?
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Right?
“Brought to you by the same people who introduced Giant Meteor 2020™
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Attacks on representative democracy are fun and exciting, especially when they’re framed as protecting us from the consequences of our own decisions as a society.
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Where I could see something like this working is selecting the pool of candidates randomly. We would still get a chance to weed through them but it’s more likely to have a better selection.
Though all of this ignores questions of whether the person selected, in whichever way, actually wants to serve. The perfect candidate might already have a life they like with a job they like in a place they like to live, seems unfair to force someone to ruin their life this way.
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Isn’t this how the Athenians did it?
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Stochastocracy?
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Lottocracy? Powerballcracy? 
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I haven’t clicked through to the Times article yet, but Frauenfelder’s post says
Under Grant’s proposal, anyone who can pass a civics test like the ones immigrants take to qualify for citizenship would be eligible to put their name in the lottery pool.
So presumably you don’t have to serve unless you want to. Which…would still probably get us plenty of big-headed, narcissistic candidates…
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The excerpt here did say “… anyone who can pass a civics test like the ones immigrants take to qualify for citizenship would be eligible to put their name in the lottery pool.” So that would at least keep people that don’t want to serve from being forced into the position. (No, thank you, really.) Of course that also means only people who opt into the pool are available, which I think seriously reduces the change of having a suitable person available. (Your idea of a randomly selected pool might be better, but I think overall random selection is not the solution to this problem!)
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While a funny thing for Arthur C Clarke to say in “Imperial Earth” his version would not work because someone/thing is deciding who is qualified to go into the lottery to begin with.
I don’t think total randomness would work because while I do agree that 90% of the random people off the street are probably going to do a better job than the people who want the job and do the things required to pursue it, it is as they say, no basis for a system of government. That other 10% could really fuck things up
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anyone who can pass a civics test like the ones immigrants take to qualify for citizenship would be eligible to put their name in the lottery pool.
So people still have to volunteer to be part of the pool. Which means that the same people who win elections would still be putting their names in the pool. And it doesn’t resolve the gerrymandering style issues where access to the test and the over-representation could happen through action from political parties.
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I knew a handyman who did work for Amish communities, as he was willing to use only hand tools, and he mentioned that one community chose their leader by putting names (of men) in a Bible and choosing one out at random. God was off one day, and they chose a stinker, who was quite problematic.
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So their research suggests we’d get better legislation from people who had no formal understanding of the legislative process and better trial outcomes from people who had no training in law?
Were these so-called “experiments” conducted by actual researchers using peer-reviewed methodology or were they conducted by random citizens chosen by lottery?
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I don’t think this would work at all. Like imagine any one of us from liberal to outright anarchist were selected to be the representative of our state, right? How fast do you think we’d all get shuffled out of any committee assignments? Like I know my views about land ownership, I want to abolish it, would scuttle any chances of me being on any committee that oversees such things. Hah.
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