This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents. An earlier version of this referred to this as 2xR, which is a worse name.
Very interesting post and great ideas - thank you!
The second "R" in 2xR reminds me very much of Stanford's "deliberative polling". In short, if you need to make a difficult decision, it might be a good idea to randomly select a subset of the population, and ask *them* to make the decision for you.
It's intriguing to think of applying this to elections. I'd be worried that such a system, while it allows for better informed voters, would be more susceptible to corruption (bribing a significant fraction of the population is expensive, but bribing a significant fraction of a 1000-person sample is cheap). Do you have any thoughts about that?
If you were to apply that algorithm to your system, you could do so directly to the voting pool to keep it maximally representative while still being full of people who are engaged with the topic and volunteered to be involved. With minimal tweaking, you could also apply it to the candidate pool: e.g., first randomly select people who meet the qualifications and see if they're interested in being candidates, then apply the second-stage selection so the final pool is as representative as it can be.
What if we put effort into preventing the Voters from being influenced? We could put the Voters up in a hotel and conference center for a bit, with security and some info isolation, as well as added civics and ethics training. Like being on a grand jury. That would hopefully prevent most overt efforts to sway the voters unduly.
I love that you're considering STAR voting as one of the possibilities. I've recently learned a whole lot about it from a STAR voting advocate friend and it's really compelling.
Very interesting post and great ideas - thank you!
The second "R" in 2xR reminds me very much of Stanford's "deliberative polling". In short, if you need to make a difficult decision, it might be a good idea to randomly select a subset of the population, and ask *them* to make the decision for you.
It's intriguing to think of applying this to elections. I'd be worried that such a system, while it allows for better informed voters, would be more susceptible to corruption (bribing a significant fraction of the population is expensive, but bribing a significant fraction of a 1000-person sample is cheap). Do you have any thoughts about that?
You may also be interested in the work discussed here: https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/its_official_we_use_the_fairest_selection_algorithm .
If you were to apply that algorithm to your system, you could do so directly to the voting pool to keep it maximally representative while still being full of people who are engaged with the topic and volunteered to be involved. With minimal tweaking, you could also apply it to the candidate pool: e.g., first randomly select people who meet the qualifications and see if they're interested in being candidates, then apply the second-stage selection so the final pool is as representative as it can be.
What if we put effort into preventing the Voters from being influenced? We could put the Voters up in a hotel and conference center for a bit, with security and some info isolation, as well as added civics and ethics training. Like being on a grand jury. That would hopefully prevent most overt efforts to sway the voters unduly.
I love that you're considering STAR voting as one of the possibilities. I've recently learned a whole lot about it from a STAR voting advocate friend and it's really compelling.