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360 points namlem | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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retrac ◴[] No.44562032[source]
The technical term is sortition. And it is my pet unorthodox political position. The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.
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gameman144 ◴[] No.44562101[source]
This may show that I'm biased, but the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me. There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking.

Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.

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1. namlem ◴[] No.44562501[source]
There are many proposed models for how to incorporate sortition into governance. Some examples:

- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)

- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect

- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one

- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials

Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.

It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).