A Proposal to Use Random Selection to Decide Election Winner

The proposal: If a district needs to elect 10 congressmen. Then each registered voter is asked whether he/she wants to run, if yes, their names will be put into a lottery. 10 names will be randomly picked from the lottery, and those names will be declared the elected Congressmen for this community. And then the resumes and personal history of these picked will be posted on the website for public viewing. This method can be used to elect president as well: anyone who wants to run can register online, and when the registration period is over, a random name will be selected and he will become the President of the country.

Now, that's my proposal. Of course many of you will say I'm being ridiculous, or I'm joking. I'm not joking at all.

To see my reasons for this proposal. Let's first talk about the election system in Western countries. In western countries, the voters vote for their congressmen or senators, but how do people become candidates in the first place? That's a sore spot of many "democracy" lovers, as it hurts for them to talk about it.

Two examples: 1) The Turkish parliament voted 50-50, almost allowing US troops to station in Turkey for the Iraqi War. However, all turkish polls done at that time indicate that 80% of the citizens are opposed to the war. If it is a true representative democracy, then the parliamentary vote should be roughly similar to the results of the poll (80-20 against, not 50-50). Of course the parliament's votes did not reflect public opinion, that is a typical characteristic of a capitalist dictatorship. 2) During the Clinton "pants-gate" scandal, polls indicated 80% of the American public believe an impeachment procedure was unnecessary, yet the procedure went ahead anyway.

What causes this? Well, why don't you let me tell you. Every representative actually represents particular interest groups. If his/her interest group benefits from the war/impeachment, he'll vote for it, otherwise he'll vote no. And maybe, after the interest groups are taken care of, they will spend 10 minutes trying to look like they represent the people as well. And in fact, there's no way voters can truly know how good a candidate is in an election. People vote with feelings, ideologics,moods, etc. etc. How many of you actually compare the candidates' detailed record and history, and truly reason and analyze your decisions in an election? I am sure none of you.

Knowing this, I believe this current system of election (including China's electoral system) is rather ridiculous. What that means is that the voters's vote are rather random (since mood and feelings change with the wind). It's not that different than if each voter voted with a dart and a board.

But this randomness is good. And my proposal uses lottery to extend that randomness to the selection of winners as well. This is what I call "blind-selection". Blind-selection is a very scientific and serious way of selecting representatives.

In fact, most of our daily activities on based on blind-selection. When you go to a barbar-shop at an unknown place, you don't go and let competing barbars make speeches for you. Instead, you randomly pick a shop. In fact, if you select your barbar by listening to their speeches, then the selection is just as random, because who would not try to promote himself for a customer? The speech has nothing to do with his barbaring skills.

The lottery method I proposed, statistically it results in a very good "sample" of the population. What is the meaning of a representative, well it is nothing but a sample from the population. And the truly accurate way to get a sample is by random selection, thus lottery. This way, candidates are immune from manipulation by interest groups, and they form a true true true sample of the people.

With this method, if there are 1% of bad people in the population, there should also be 1% of bad people in the Parliament/Congress, and vice versa. And all votes of the Parliament will very closely resemble the opinions of the population, because the members of the parliament are a snapshot of the population.

And only then can these members deserve to be called representatives, the country be a true true true democracy.