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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As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.
If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.
We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
simple: let voters decide. that is, eliminate the concept of pre-selected candidates and let voters select candidates from the entire population. if you need 10 people, give everyone 10 votes. everyone has a different idea what merrit is, but by giving everyone multiple votes the people for which the most voters think they have merrit will emerge as the winners of the election.
That is not because voters are stupid. It is because they are rationally ignorant. Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense. However, if we instead convened "elector juries" of a couple hundred randomly selected citizens and gave them the resources to carefully research and vet the candidates before deliberating on who is best, I think they would do a pretty good job.
It isn't about being discerning. If you are going to vote and you are a swing/politically agnostic voter in a two party system (like the US/UK) you have the following three choices really:
* Vote for the least bad candidate / lesser of two evils.
* Protest Vote. In the US this would be probably the Libertarian Party / Green Party. In England this would be Reform / Liberal Democrats / Greens etc.
* Spoil the Ballet / Abstain from voting.
Red/Blue Team diehards aren't worth talking about as they don't decide elections. It is the swing voters.
> Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense.
It makes no sense because you have two actual choices (Red Team / Blue Team) or effectively to choose to not participate.
Additionally most politically agnostic that are over the age of 30 have worked out that you get shafted whoever you vote for.