We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government (2019)
75 comments
·May 21, 2025whack
bestouff
I'm always impressed how many of our problems were solved very long ago (in this case, we know Athenians did "Citizen Assemblies" more than a thousand years ago) but then our systems slowly decay and the solution is lost.
That means a well working democratic country with a working welfare and social net will eventually degrade into some random authoritarian shithole. That scares me.
ta12653421
Not true: While frame as "the holy first democratic state", most people were excluded: The ones who were allowed to vote/elect, were mainly the rich upperclass, Women, Slaves, Children etc. weren allowed to participate / attend.
Kinrany
The only way in which this is relevant is if the populations of voters are different in ways that affect the voting mechanism. For all we care they could have been warlord cannibals: all that matters is that we can use the same mechanism.
knowitnone
yes, but at the time, they were considered property. With the system the way it currently is, only the rich get to play.
shw1n
One of my favorite quotes re: the classics:
"Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago."
namlem
Keep in mind that Athenian democracy was ended through conquest by Macedon, not internal collapse.
martin-t
I don't see why not just skip the "representatives" part and have juries vote on laws directly.
If you take away the little power people have to influence the government, why not at least do it without adding another layer of indirection?
The idea of a representative is flawed from the start to begin with. There is probably no single person in my country who agrees with me on everything. Therefore any person I choose to represent myself is only an approximation of what I really want.
I increasingly feel like the belief that people need to be ruled by powerful individuals (or worse, i single individual) comes from some primitive need that evolved back when combat ability was your group's primary predictor of survival.
gjm11
If you have independent votes on everything then you run the risk that there are a bunch of mutually-incompatible things that all get majority approval.
(Would you rather higher taxes or lower? Lower, of course. Higher state pensions or lower? Higher, of course. Stronger or weaker military? Stronger, of course. Better or worse infrastructure? Better, of course. More teachers or fewer? More, of course. More national debt or less? Less, of course. Etc.)
This doesn't require any individual person to be irrational or forgetful or anything, although in fact people frequently are.
Also, whoever selects just which things get voted on has a great deal of power, more than most elected representatives have. If those people are elected then you've effectively got a representative democracy after all; if not, then arguably you've effectively not got a democracy at all.
Representative government as such doesn't solve this problem, but in practice it means that a candidate or party proposes a whole basket of policies to get judged collectively, and between when they get into power and when the electorate decides whether they did a good enough job to elect them again there's enough time for a wide variety of those different interacting things all to have happened and either worked well or not.
I don't want to claim that this works particularly well. But it feels to me like any sort of direct democracy would likely work much worse.
(Maybe there's scope for a hybrid system: elections every few years for representatives who are then obliged to put various classes of major decision to a national vote.)
xp84
In theory, I think the argument for juries electing candidates is one of efficiency: back in normal times, there were many, many issues facing Congress in a given year, and they would pass lots of legislation to handle those issues. Empaneling a new jury for each update to the farm bill or appropriation of money for some random government program seems like a lot of overhead. On the other hand, in the current ridiculous US atmosphere, it seems like Congress only passes a couple bills each session, which are enormous omnibus spending bills using strategic pork and legislative tricks to bypass the consensus-based rules that used to be easy to meet before polarization. I don’t think that’s a good condition though.
I agree that the extreme, though, where a jury elects a monarch, would be excessive. I would be interested in a system where separate juries elect government ministers (e.g. Defence, Education, Housing, etc), so that there would be a better chance that average people’s opinions could be taken into account in the running of each of the government agencies, instead of having all of them run by the same ideology because they’re all appointed by one party or president.
dmoy
Yea one nice characteristic of a representative democracy is that the voting is a rough approximation of who would win if the swords (guns, whatever) came out and it devolved into civil war. But without the bloodshed and loss.
Doesn't work as well as a proxy in the modern age with our level of technology though I suppose.
rafd
Terry Bouricius (Vermont politician) has a draft book on this topic (link below). He used to be a strong advocate for electoral reform, but after seeing Citizen Assemblies in action, now advocates for Sortition.
He has some interesting ideas about how to structure a modern government with sortition - it wouldn't just be replacing the House and Senate with randomly selected representatives, but, instead: having more smaller bodies with more limited scope (ex. a body for defining the rules of bodies), and spinning out a new group for every major law proposal.
My favorite discovery on this topic (mentioned in the book), were letters between the Founding Fathers of the US where they explicitly discussed not having "democracy" in the United States, because it would give too much power to the people, and so they purposefully chose an election based system because it allowed for elites to retain control by using money to run campaigns (note also: "democracy" at the time referred exclusively to Athenian style democracy).
https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-el...
gjm11
This submission is currently marked as [flagged] but I can't see what is supposedly wrong with it: it's an interesting article about an interesting idea, and while it's kinda politics-adjacent it's not the sort of party-political that tends to induce rage and stupidity, and the comments here seem pretty reasonable.
I guess there's a sizeable contingent of HN readers who don't want anything having anything to do with politics on HN, but I think some politics-related things -- including this -- fall into the category of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
rawgabbit
It is either they are willfully ignorant as we watch habeas corpus and due process erode. Or they are just ostriches putting their heads in the sand.
patcon
@dang given that HN is a pretty powerful place, and things read here are what a certain a sort of world shaper will know about:
can you say whether there have been any interference operations by nation-state adversaries to subtly prune content? I wonder whether HN's monitoring tools are robust to detect such things
When I see this being downvoted, it's a field I know well, and it's considered by many to be the best response to the neo-reactionary movement and radical progressive left's division of the political conversation, and perhaps the best hope for unifying a shattered US democratic system.
I can't help but be suspicious of in whose interest it would be to suppress these conversations and ideas.
cjbgkagh
The hereditary House of Lords had a bit of a random walk property where the original peerage given by the King many generations ago becomes quite disconnected to the peer now in the house. To have this property it needs to be an old tradition - to recover this property if recreating it from scratch perhaps an initial lottery could be used.
In any case it is an example of some randomness in the political process and in my opinion probably better than non-hereditary peerage where the peer has bought their position from the sitting government. Though that is a rather low bar.
With regards to historical lotteries if I remember my history class from decades ago the various great families didn’t want the role of governance because they had to act in the national interest instead of their house interest, and the randomness of the lottery meant that if they ruled in their own favor they’d be open to reprisal after their tenure was completed.
PaulRobinson
Hereditary peers are now a minority and on their way out. Within the next generation they'll all be gone.
Did you know you can just apply to be a peer? Like, literally, anyone can do this: https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/how-to-apply-2
cjbgkagh
I think the government strategy there was to make it worse to the point people question why even have the House of Lords and there being no good answer.
PaulRobinson
On the contrary, life peers have made it more obvious that non-political "talent" can be brought into the upper chamber, and people you'd never see out campaigning can bring their expertise to scrutinize legislation. "People's Peers" can't take a political whip, and there is more scrutiny over cash for peerages now than there ever was.
It's deeply flawed how the PM can appoint, and there isn't enough diversity, but they can pause legislation (if not actually stop it), to cause a rethink. That's happened most recently on the assisted dying bill. Many are glad it's happened because it's improved the outcome, albeit at the cost of a delay.
I do think there is a better way than the current system, but I'm not entirely sure I can describe it, yet.
chr15m
Why not both? The selection of the Venetian Doge had alternating rounds of election and sortition. Apparently this served to ward off power hungry egomaniacs. Could be useful today.
chr15m
It was like that for 500 years:
> New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.[31] > --wikipedia
aeontech
Wow, that is a brilliant approach. Thank you for sharing. In the US we seem to be stuck in a local maximum (or local minimum) with little chance of changes to the existing system - I wonder what kind of solutions exist to transform an entrenched institutional process, barring drastic upheaval...
namlem
Yep! I actually wrote a piece about how the Venetian system might be adapted for the modern day: https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-techn...
delichon
Take two political extremists, one believes that taxation is theft, the other that property is theft. The difference could make Kamala and Donald seem like twins. Sortition is a way for either to become decision makers by chance. Whichever is more objectionable to you, could you really endorse a process that would put them in power, as opposed to a traditional election where the extremes tend to winnow out? That seems like a large increase in the risk of getting an extreme result.
AnimalMuppet
Sure, that's true - for any one person.
Now take a representative body with 100 members. You get, say, five extremists on the left and seven on the right. The other 88 members basically leave those 12 extremists on the margins, and the extremists become irrelevant.
Now, if extremists (total of all flavors) exceed 50% of your population, you're in trouble. But you were probably in trouble in a democracy, too...
delichon
So you endorse sortition for large bodies, but not for an executive or a small committee? What's a reasonable threshold?
AnimalMuppet
I think that's right. The point of sortition is for the body to look (statistically) like the wider public. The smaller the number of people in the body, the more likely it is that they are not representative.
I'm sure statisticians could give a better answer than I can about where the line should be. I think it is basically a statistical question.
But for a one-person executive? No, probably not a good idea.
snapplebobapple
I'd be ok with this if any tax increase had to be voted on in a referendum with a super majority of 70% voting for the tax increase and if anyone who wanted to participate in the lottery had to post 2 weeks of their average income for the last five years (with a floor at 2 weeks minimum wage) as a bond for the duration of the government and any deficits the government incurred came out of the posted bond first.
It's unfortunate their justification for this is racist, ageist and anti-success though. It's easy to see how 300-400 randomly selected citizens would probably do a better job than career politicians at spending a given pot of money, they would just be much worse at deciding how big the pot of government money should be due to the preference to take from the successful and enrich oneself and one's group.
jccalhoun
Treating legislation like jury duty could be interesting. The question is who would be responsible for weeding out the legislator pool? Representatives from the political parties perhaps? Maybe a senate proposes laws and then a true representative body would be in charge of deciding if the proposal should pass? They serve a couple weeks passing laws and then are dismissed. It might be interesting to try on a state/local level.
xp84
> Representatives from the political parties
Okay, hold it right there: any proposal for reform that doesn’t begin with throwing all of those people straight into the ocean is a nonstarter for me.
jawns
If you're interested in a literary take on this concept, read "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton in 1904.
Available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm
xivzgrev
Could be interesting. My main fear would be a wider variability in behavior, reducing effectiveness.
Currently there are incentives against representatives acting too much like assholes - they would lose the support of their political party, effectively ending their career.
Randomly chosen people have no such incentive. Take the loudest, most obnoxious people and put them in our congress? Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.
I’m sure most people chosen would be fine, but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the batch / process.
PaulHoule
It goes the other way around. I'd think the kind of people who get elected today, if offered a chance to be corrupt, would often decline politely or it would be possible for people to extend feelers to get some idea about it.
Trying to corrupt a set of random Americans who weren't selected by "being good at politics" would be like a game of Russian Roulette. Some people would go for it but sooner or later you'd be looking at the barrel of a gun or get the police called on you or something.
namlem
When France had a citizens' assembly on climate, lobbyists from both the government and corporations tried to approach some delegates outside of the assembly and they were promptly snitched on.
vorpalhex
The primary form of corruption we see is an indirect tit-for-tat. "You buy our x,y and z and we'll hire you for a cushy gig many years from now."
And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more.
Government by lotto would dramatically increase corruption.
patcon
> And when we look at amateur politicians (smaller elections, smaller electoral pools, first time candidates) then we see this happen.. more. Much, much more.
It's a known fact that smaller governments are more corrupt, but that's due to low levels of infrastructure for oversight, not because of some equivalence in corruptability of the career political players vs small/amateur players. [1]
Small outsider players with similar oversight as federal politics would surely be less corruptible in the ways we normally track
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_local_government
cjbgkagh
If the lotteries are regular the number of people that would need to be bribed increases as does the risk of exposure. At some point it stops being worth the risk. On the spectrum of centralization such that only one person decides to the other end with complete devolution such that each person decides there is a trade off on how much it cost to bribe the ‘politician’ and how much gain could be obtained from the bribe. In the extreme case of everyone deciding you’d have to bribe everyone and it would be impossible for the value extraction to be greater than the bribe. It would be hard to do worse than entrenched political parties and who tend to have lifetime and even hereditary tenures.
dylan604
and when "many years from now" finally arrives, what guarantee is there that the promise of a cushy gig would be remembered if honored? seems like a very risky proposition for the one being corrupted much more than the one doing the corrupting. that's the best "i'll gladly pay you on tuesday for a hamburger today" arrangement.
AnimalMuppet
Why would random selection wind up putting the loudest, most obnoxious people in Congress? Why would it be worse at it than, say, the current process?
> Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.
Yeah, that sounds very much like the current Congress...
aaronbaugher
I've served on a few juries, and they've been far more sensible than Congress. I'm all for selecting representatives the same way, randomly from a pool of law-abiding citizens. Most of the work could be done remotely, so people wouldn't have to quit their jobs and go live in the capital and lose touch with the people back home. Keep the terms short, like 6 months, so they don't have much chance to "grow in office" and start trying to rule the world. Offer a decent stipend to pay for the inconvenience, which could be a fraction of what the current ones cost.
You'd probably have to have a hardship opt-out for people who honestly couldn't do it for personal reasons. But as long as it wasn't too strenuous--and there's no reason it should be--most would be willing to do it, just like jury duty. It's a great idea, very democratic.
bombcar
Part of the reason juries work so well is the default “fuck you I don’t understand so I say not guilty”.
If the prosecutor tries to baffle the jury the jury won’t convict.
If something happens similar with “legislative juries” where they’d refuse to pass a complicated law they didn’t understand.
teeray
> so people wouldn't have to quit their jobs
You would have to work out corruption of the common Joe here. Employers hold massive sway over their employees, and by nature of employing lots of people would have a pretty good chance of employing some fraction of the government. It would need to be possible for these randomly-selected individuals to enact policies that work counter to the interests of their employers without them fearing for their livelihood after their term. Otherwise, we just make lobbying cheap or free: “all of you—vote for this or else.” I think, at minimum, companies should be unable to terminate such individuals for some cooldown period after their term.
lotharcable
Right now most Democratic systems are a contest to find the most perfect high functioning psychopath.
It filters for people who possess the ability to lie very convincingly, tell people what they want to hear, disregard their own failings, and high levels of superficial charm and a overwhelmingly strong desire for social status and access to power.
Also in the last 75 years or so, due to the way party politics dominate election choices and the nature of internal politics there has been a rise in the 'professionalization' of the political class. Decades ago representatives were often people with professional expertise and notority outside of politics who are more or less amateurs. Now the vast majority of politicians are people who have dedicated their entire lives to it.
However it is a profession with no professional standards, no training, no monitoring body, no certification system, and is largely unaccountable.
All of these are very bad things to have in a representational democracy because having a dedicated class of managers it is not representational at all.
Where as a lotto system solves all these problems.
pjio
I'm absolutely for trying this out. But not in the country I live in.
PaulHoule
I think it makes sense in terms of a multicameral legislature. I can't imagine you want to pick the president by lottery or probably not even senators but why not the House of Representatives? Maybe we need a lawyer-heavy legislative body to write laws, but we also need legislators who aren't lawyers so people believe somebody in the legislature has some empathy for them.
adrian_b
I think that it is for the president where this would be most beneficial.
For senators and representatives there still is a little randomness, but when I look at many presidents that have been elected in recent years in various countries, it is more than obvious that any randomly chosen individual would have been almost certainly a less bad human and more suitable for the presidential position.
After a president is chosen by lottery, there should be a rejection procedure, to eliminate any really inappropriate candidate, but then a new candidate should be chosen by lottery to replace the rejected one, until no reasons for rejection can be found.
pjio
As an additional committee which has to approve laws this might really make sense.
Most modern incarnations of this idea revolve around Citizen Assemblies. Ireland, as an example, convened a citizen assembly in order to discuss and propose reforms on topics like abortion, climate change, and political reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland)
The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations.
In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well
https://www.electionbyjury.org/