an improved democracy?

[mynameisalex]

Today I was pondering the upcoming elections and my past experiences with them, and I stumbled on an idea. Now I figured I'd post it here just to see the reaction...

This stems from me being skeptical about how informed we all are about the complex issues of governing and which candidates may do the best job.
Before I explain the idea, you might want to know of some basic statistics. Particularly, the idea of random sampling, which, when used correctly, is capable of creating a small population that is surprisingly well representative of a much larger one. These techniques are of course used in sampling polls, which historically have sometimes been far off (generally due to sampling biases), but have improved fairly greatly over time. Random sampling is also used in jury duty selection, and the statistical principles that allow it to be accurate are the same ones used in essentially all of the science and medicine experiments done in these days, to prove whether some technique truly did have some effect.

Now, say I take a state with about 5 million people, and choose a random sample of 5000. It is very likely that that sample will be a good representation of the views of the entire population. Additionally, the statistics also show that increasing the sample size cannot actually improve it much. So a random sample of 100,000 or even 1 million of the people would be only very slightly better (and still extremely close to a complete representation)

Perhaps you see where I am going with this...
Basically, as a thought experiment, rather than having everyone vote, what if we just take a good random sample and just allow those people to vote. Now, before anyone goes berserk on me, let's look at some arguments, and I'll explain a bit more.

First, there is the expected critique: can this really be a good representation?
Well first of all, we would all like to think that our current system gives a great representation, but not necessarily. Voter turnout can be low, and I don't think it is only the people who don't care about the vote who are not voting. To truly vote well, people need to do their research on the candidates and to, of course, make it to the voting places. But many people, including those who are less well off and may not have the time to properly vote, even if it could be important for them to do so, won't get a chance. However, with the random sampling idea there's a solution to this. Similar to jury duty, and since the number of people in the whole sample is small compared to the population, special attention can be taken so that they can vote properly. They can be paid a reasonable amount for their lost time, ensured that they can get to the voting places, etc.

Perhaps even better, this sample population could be given all the resources and time they need to do in-depth analyses of all the candidates (not the superficial stuff many of us are getting). And this could become something like jury duty, for which employers and others understand that the selected person (if they accept) has a responsibility to be thorough and make a truly good selection, for the better of the population. Note though, that unlike jury duty, each individual would not meet with the others or be in any way influenced by their choices.

Plus, there are a few other pros:
-The rest of us wouldn't have to spend time on elections.
-All the election systems (organization, counting votes, etc.) would become much simpler.
-We wouldn't have to see all the dumb political commercials during big elections, or have so much money wasted on those political campaigns (there might still be a little campaigning in the form of presenting information to sample populations but it would be more in depth and on a much smaller scale)
-We might actually get intelligent politicians instead of random people who have good-sounding names, and good looks, and lots of money to waste.

Something else I might add, is that the ballot would be better if it was different than just selecting candidates. For instance, allow the voters to rate every one of the candidates on a scale, and then all the points are added for each candidate. If someone has a very strong preference then they can give one candidate many more points than another, while someone with a weak preference can give them a slightly different number of points; or something similar, I haven't put a great deal of thought into it.

Additionally, I want to add something regarding the accuracy of sampling polls (and thus random sampling). There is a complete distinction between representing a population accurately and predicting the future. A sampling poll might give a great representation of the population (and with correct random sampling the statistics can almost guarantee that it will), but that doesn't mean this can predict what people will do on election day. For one, people might not take the poll as seriously as the actual election, and give a different answer; and also, people change their minds quite a bit. Approval ratings can vary greatly simply due to the approval of the population actually varying over time, and in the end the person who gets elected is whoever has the approval in their favor when election day comes. Something one might take from this is that voting is not always a precise science. Personally, I wouldn't be too surprised if, having given the same exact election twice (repeated all the voting), the results could come out significantly different (due to people changing their votes).

Anyway... what do you think?

 

[Intense]

One Person, one Vote.

 

[jwoodie]

Why not take it a step further and randomly select a group of people to serve as state legislators? The argument that they would not have the necessary experience or qualifications is bogus: Our present system has only one requirement, that the candidate promises to do whatever the political party bosses tell him/her to do. Common sense has been entirely abandoned to special interest payoffs.

 

[saar331]

not sure

 

[midcan5]

Any system that grants a select group of people a privilege or power is susceptible to corruption in a variety of ways. Today we have something similar within the judicial system, look only at republicans blocking judges they consider too liberal, and then look at blocked selections made by republicans in the past. Consider the terrible Citizens United decision, consider the recent un-American Civil rights decision, and consider how many Americans would be alive today, if the Gore/Bush decision was allowed a vote rather than a selection. Hitting below the belt you say....

"[T]he rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying." DFW The Believer - Interview with David Foster Wallace

 

[mynameisalex]

Why not take it a step further and randomly select a group of people to serve as state legislators? The argument that they would not have the necessary experience or qualifications is bogus: Our present system has only one requirement, that the candidate promises to do whatever the political party bosses tell him/her to do. Common sense has been entirely abandoned to special interest payoffs.

Hmm, that is an interesting thought, and even crazier than mine. I suppose if those picked can choose to not accept (and somehow avoiding disruption to the random selection process, as many might not accept), and then there is some practical training useful for whatever their duties are going to be, which could be taught to them before they are officially accepted, then it might be plausible.
One possible concern is that there seems to be less to buffer potentially bad choices of the random selection process. For instance, if a few voters are picked who don't really know what they are doing and vote for terrible candidates, it's likely their votes would not change the end result, due to all the other voters. But if those few people were immediately made into legislators the result might be worse. Still probably better than our current system, though, and I bet there are other ways to add in a some kind of checking system to prevent such situations anyway.

 

[Katzndogz]

Democracies always fail. They exist only until such time as a majority starts voting themselves funds from the public treasury. Thereafter the only candidates that can be elected to office are the ones who promise the most. We just saw that in the New York City mayoral election.

 

[mynameisalex]

Any system that grants a select group of people a privilege or power is susceptible to corruption in a variety of ways. Today we have something similar within the judicial system, look only at republicans blocking judges they consider too liberal, and then look at blocked selections made by republicans in the past. Consider the terrible Citizens United decision, consider the recent un-American Civil rights decision, and consider how many Americans would be alive today, if the Gore/Bush decision was allowed a vote rather than a selection. Hitting below the belt you say....

"[T]he rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: ...

Well, regarding the black and white nature of politics, I would like to think that it would be different when the system gives voters the time to look more in-depth. The candidates would be expected to present very detailed information on their plans, how they will handle complex problems, etc, and the voters would be given time to actually try to understand all of this. Though we would need to get the voters to take it as their responsibility to do a good job at this.

The problem of corruption is trickier. Of course, the voters could be secretly corrupt and get paid off to vote for a certain candidate. And even if that can be prevented, of course the people who are elected can become corrupt as well. Unfortunately I don't see any simple solution (I doubt there is one), but I can offer a few thoughts. Besides various checks to try to catch exploitation, I think corruption and similar problems can be largely reduced by diffusing parts where power is concentrated. Essentially then, a kind of compromise: when the vote is for something important, group sizes should be larger. For instance, a national election, it might be possible to bribe off hundreds of people, out of a random group of thousands; but if, instead, the group size is 300,000 (0.1% of pop), with good systems to catch corruption I think it would be very unlikely that a significant portion of the voters could be exploited; or at least, breaking that system wouldn't be very much easier than breaking the one we already have. With corruption, it is a continuous battle between the people who try to expose and stop it and the people who try to hide it, and the battle could go either way at different levels under different circumstances... I think it is tough to predict what would happen, but worth discussion.