A Proposal to Use Random Selection to Decide Election Winner

Problems:

1) Only 1% of a population is "bad"? I believe most people are good, but not 99%. Besides, mere "goodness" does not make one a competent politician. Jimmy Carter is beautiful man with a compassionate heart, but he is considered to have been a mediocre president.

2) Drawing names from a lottery of willing candidates will not necessarily result in a legislative body of mostly "good" people. One common complaint about the American system is that a lot of highly capable people don't want to hold public office.

Are you familiar with the US jury system? Many highly educated professionals weasel out of jury duty because it's tedious and doesn't pay well, and thus, isn't worth missing work for.

3) Lottery winners would still be vulnerable to corruption. It is said that many US government leaders enter politics full of idealism but their lofty principles are gradually eroded by campaign contributions and junkets. If elections were abolished, there would be no need for campaign war chests, but there would still be bribery and junkets. My former employer funded domestic and overseas vacations disguised as delegations for local government officials in China.

In a representative democracy, representatives do not always vote according to the wishes of the majority. If, however, they ignore the will of the people too often or on key issues, they do risk losing their seat in the next election.

While many of Turkey's parliamentarians voted contrary to the wishes of their constituency, in the US, nearly the entire Congress voted for the war because of overwhelming public support. No Democrat wanted their next opponent to tar them with an accusation of being soft on Saddam.

The barber shop analogy is just silly. I've had plenty of bad hair cuts, and two months is enough time to grow one out enough to be repaired. An elected official typically holds office for 2-6 years. Bush has two more years in office, and that's two years too long for me!

I do actually pay attention to how a candidate votes on major issues. It's going to be tough voting this November because so many members of Congress voted for the war. The big problem with voting records is that no voter will find a candidate whose record is 100% in accordance with their views, so voters tend to stick to a few key issues. For me, the biggest issue is Iraq. If there are no genuine anti-war candidates, then I'll be looking at other issues like the extension of the Patriot Act and immigration.

Math's proposal might work in an imaginary scenario. But the real world doesn't work like that.

Let's suppose that there are about 80% of people in one area who agree with side A in some issue. The lottery could easily land in the other 20%, and what would happen then? Besides, the lottery method can't promise that all of the candidates will take the whole thing responsibly and seriously, the reason being that they were picked on a lottery, and not chosen.

I didn't read Math's post, as I'm sure he won't read this.

But if he's arguing for random elections, it will at least be better than CCP china today because:

It would allow CCP outsiders to get into the party, and leadership wouldn't be self-selected by people looking for other who are drinking and loving the party cool-aid.

Ariel Sharon on the late Moshe Dayan:

"He would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more were bad; the remaining two, however, were brilliant."

I have a feeling we'll have to wait some time before Math comes up with his two.

Nausicaa, great to see you back. Please consider sticking around - I think you'll find it a kinder, gentler forum than it used to be.

(And yes, I am totally ignoring Math's "essay.")

I lean towards some form of Meritocracy coupled with political transparency and freedom of the press to help battle corruption and the abuse of power. I'm not sure how this would be organised but I believe that the right to vote and, indeed, the right to stand for election should be granted only to those who deserve these privileges by meeting certain standards. Of course, the difficulty would be in defining the criteria of merit which a person must meet in order to be granted these rights.

I lean toward a shareholder system of government, where individuals vote not with votes, but with capital, where the candidate that recieves the backing of the most capital in society wins (it's been the case in the U.S., where campaign funding is actually more closely correlated with local electoral results than popular opinion). Then, such a government would always favor the most efficient capitalization and economic expansion, by definition, and consequently it would always overpower other governments economically. Of course, the right to property would be the sole fundamental right in such a system, and the government would be constitutionally bound into a minarchist system, where it does basically nothing for the average system.

If there's ever a lunar colony, I think that it might work.

t-co, are you being sarcastic or are you for real? If you are so much for this “shareholder system of government�, you should stay in the US. Otherwise you can try Hong Kong.

Efficient capitaliziation and economic expansion are not the sole purposes of government, however.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Not every society or government may agree with this assessment of the role of government but most would argue that ensuring economic expansion is only one among many governmental responsibilities. These responsibilities are ignored at the peril or the leadership.

The post was semi-sarcastic. The thing is, I see most governments around the world bound more toward a de facto social contract toward lumps of capital like corporations than groups of people like a society (the Bush administration's obsession with lower taxes and pork rather than the well-being of America, the CCP's obsession with GDP growth rather than--although it claims to care--the median welfare of its people). So I'm just trying to say, why not make that social contract explicit rather than implicit? It would make the government a heck of a lot more effective and efficient--it wouldn't have to 说一套�一套 anymore.

So are you saying that since Bush isn't focused on the well being of the people, and the CCP isn't focused on the well being of the people, it's essentially the same?

If so, then maybe we should insert cannibalism in there somewhere.