To Save America's Democracy We Should End Elections

Sortition (the formal term for this) is very attractive, because it seems it would eliminate corruption and other political ills. The problem is that the bureaucracy (he part of the executive branch that has some legislative power) would grow, become more corrupt itself, and become very effective at manipulating the citizen-legislators. I don't think you can eliminate the Federal or State bureaucracies without also parallelizing the legislative process.

Now, don't get me wrong, sortition may improve things for a time. But like code, people figure out how to take advantage of laws. Re-writing the US Constitution on a regular basis is very risky; instead, SCOTUS changes it's opinion on what the Constitution means periodically; it's like updating the interpreter's code instead of changing user-submitted code.

You might also be interested in the districting method in which you draw district boundaries through the middle of high-population areas. Half the population would be on either side of each boundary. You keep subdividing until you have as many districts as needed. (Sorry, I don't remember the name for this, but it was the best option I could find when I last looked into this topic more than a decade ago.)

The word for this is sortition. It does have an interesting history. I like the idea, but I'd want to see it on a smaller scale before committing to it. Maybe a city or one of the smaller states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Hi HN, I've been thinking about this for months now and with each pass I find myself more enamored with it as a mode of achieving representative democracy. Interested to hear your thoughts. I think this would be an entire constitutional re-write if implemented, but I am optimistic that random sequestered groups of our peers would work quite well as legislative representatives and do a decent job in earnest. Maybe each law would have an expiration date with varying lengths determined by degree of consensus. E.g foundational rights should consistently yield 100% support of Freedom of speech and would be due to renew once a decade while novel laws with smaller pluralities could be briefly trialed and discarded by default if not successful

Let's randomly summon citizens to serve brief terms as legislators. It's less crazy than it sounds and even if it weren't it still sounds better than what we've got. For the people by the people. You're already destined to be judged by such a group in the court of law. I offer that sequestered citizen legislators would perform their function radically better than our current system