Comment by psadauskas

4 days ago

Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.

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psadauskas

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mothballed  4 days ago

This is why I'm in favor of sortition instead of voting.

The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery.

Virtually every elected politician does.

~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.

  • jacquesm  4 days ago

    There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.

    But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.

    • Teever  4 days ago

      I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.

      The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.

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  • rudolftheone  4 days ago

    That's super-interesting experiment, but I wouldn't start it in such a large country as USA. Why won't humanity test it on a smaller scale?

    In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.

    These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?