In Tegen Verkiezingen staat het systeem van multi-body sortition beschreven. Dit systeem houdt in dat er niet één gelote groep mensen zou moeten zijn die tijdelijk beslissingen neemt, maar dat je de verschillende taken toewijst aan meerdere gelote groepen (kamers). Aldus loot je één groep burgers voor het bepalen van de agenda, verschillende groepen burgers voor elk uit te werken onderwerp op de agenda, en een aparte gelote groep voor het uiteindelijke stemmen over de gecreëerde voorstellen. Daarnaast zouden er nog gelote groepen moeten zijn die toezicht houden op het systeem van loting zélf. Vanzelfsprekend rouleren de gelote burgers in de betreffende kamers, en hoeven zij niet in elke kamer even lang zitting te hebben. Het opstellen van een wetsvoorstel kan meerdere maanden in beslag nemen; het stemmen over wetsvoorstellen kan bij wijze van spreken in een halve of hele dag.
In de onderstaande video komt Terrill ('Terry') Bouricius aan het woord. Bouricius was ooit zelf een gekozen politicus, en ervoer direct hoe slecht verkiezingen en gekozen politici functioneerden. Hij heeft het systeem van multi-body sortition, dat in zekere zin al zijn oorsprong had in het oude Athene, verder uitgewerkt; zie het artikel Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day.
Uit de video:
Over rational ignorance: 'If you [as a voter] have one vote out of a large number, the chance that your one vote is going to make the difference between this outcome or that outcome, can become vanishingly small. So it's not rational to spend a huge amout of time, for each person, to really understand all the details of the candidates, all the details of the issues, and make the best informed decision. So you're always having decision making of who the leaders will be by an uninformed electorate. It is inevitable.'
'And also, for elections to work to hold public officials to account, the voters again would have to spend a lot of time to really become well informed about the performance of candidates or people in public office. And they would have to know if that particular public official had power to change the outcome of that. Is that something that there was a global economic situation that the person who was elected had no power to change? Or was that person responsible? And the fact is: none of us know. So elections basically cannot hold people to account because voters are unable to monitor. Because they cannot get the information, they don't have the time to get the information, and often the information is unknowable until maybe decades later to say "oh, well, if they had known this, then they might have made a different decision"'
'Elections drive partisanship. And partisanship drives bifurcation of society. It is in the interest of politicians to demonize, to claim that your opponents are either evil or foolish. And that filters down to the general population.'
'There are certain skills that are needed for winning elections. And those skills have no correlation at all with the skills needed to govern well. Because people who can win elections and mobilize voters, there's no reason to think - in fact there's a lot of evidence to the contrary - that they are more suited than other people to govern.'
'...it's important to know that the French and American revolutionaries were anti-democratic. They believed in a republic, like Rome. They thought that elections would elect the natural aristocracy to govern the people. They viewed democracy as mob rule. It would threaten the wealth and property of the rich. (...) Most of them actually in their writing talk about the dangers of democracy, and why they should use elections instead of democracy.'
'Politicians are experts in pretending to know what they are talking about. I talk about myself as a recovering politician. (...) Politicians are not experts on public policy. They are experts in public relations.'
'How do you know when a group is well informed? Well, the best way to figure that out is to have a randomly selected group of members discuss: how should future juries get informed? How should we select experts? (...) That method of saying these are bona fide experts to advize a jury can evolve over time, from experience.'
'The random lottery process needs to be so public and above board that nobody says: "Ah, they faked it. They pretended to do a lottery but they cooked the books and they picked their friends or whatever." And there's a lot of ways you can do that. You could say: "This is the algorithm we're going to use to randomly select every n'th member on the member list. Here's the member list - ahead of time - and the way to pick the seed number - that goes into the algorithm that's right there in public - is we're going to take the third digit of the barometric pressure on this barometer on this date at exactly noon."'
21 juli 2021
Zie ook:
- A Radical Proposal for True Democracy
- Exporting Oregon-Style Democracy
- Democracy Without Elections: Amerikaanse organisatie voor loting
- Organisatie 'of by for' wil Citizens' Panel over covid-19 in Michigan
- Michigan loot burgers voor opnieuw bepalen grenzen kiesdistricten
- Lezing door de Amerikaanse lotingsonderzoeker James Fishkin bij de RSA
- Vijf parlementariërs staat Washington bepleiten burgerberaad klimaat
- Politics Without Politicians - The New Yorker schrijft opnieuw over loting
- New York Times: 526 gelote kiezers, America in One Room
- Amerikanen gebruiken loterij om loting te promoten
- Nu ook artikel over loting in The Economist
- Oprichting van het Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition