WI: US uses sortition

Pretty straightforward. What if the US Constitution uses sortition (random selection from the entire eligible population) to select members of government?

What might this look like in practice? I was thinking the House would be selected by sortition, since the larger numbers (435 vs 100 in the Senate) will iron out the statistical errors (no chance of 51 randomly-selected Nazis ruining it for the rest of us), plus the House is is supposed to be more representative of the people.

How would random selection of 435 people among a population of hundreds of millions work? And what might the modern political system look like?
 
It could not be worse, and would likely be better

Definitely better if certain people are ineligible. This would include anyone under a certain age, anyone incapable of carrying out the duties of a politician (mental disabilities like severe Down's syndrome or late stage dementia or people with terminal illness, etc.), convicted felons and anyone serving a prison sentence. Likely you could decline the position too, and I think a lot of people would (Amish, Jehovah's Witness, and similar religious people, people with other priorities in life, many anarchists, etc.). Some method to recall or expel a Representative would obviously have to be in place, in case a Representative starts taking the whole thing as a joke or otherwise goes off the rails (this would be how a neo-Nazi might be dealt with).

So probably there would be a list drawn up, and the first person on the list would be the Representative. If they declined or were ineligible, it moves on to the second person on the list and so forth.
 

PhilippeO

Banned
any citizens gain number during his adulthood or when moving to that state/electoral district. when representative is needed a method (numbered ball inside drum / computer randomized / etc) is picked to gain list of dozens of number. non-existant and death number is removed. contact all people in list. remove all unwilling and incapable. picked highest person in list.
 
Highly difficult to use a system like this one with an 18th c. information technology. It would take months to establish a list, correct it, select people (actually the easiest part), contact them, return with impossibilities (many farmers would simply refuse to siege), select people from the corrected list, contact them etc. As many direct representative systems have experimented since Antiquity, the hardest part is getting people to participate into running the democracy.
 
You probably couldn't really pull of a pure sortition system in the 18th century. However, you could have a system where candidates have to get, say, at least 10% of their district's vote to be eligible for the drawing.
 
You probably couldn't really pull of a pure sortition system in the 18th century. However, you could have a system where candidates have to get, say, at least 10% of their district's vote to be eligible for the drawing.

I was thinking along the same lines, actually. The only way it would work in the 18th century, both logistically and culturally, is if the dietitian applied to a pool of candidates who’d already passed a certain threshold. Honestly, I think it would be most plausible as a means of picking high officials rather than for all elections. For example, I could see the the President being drawn from either the electoral college or the Senate by sortition. Perhaps even the electoral college itself could be drawn that way in a system where each state forms a pool of candidates either by public threshold elections or by the state legislature selecting them and then the actual electors would be drawn from that pool by sortition. I don’t think you could reasonably see Congress picked this way-it would go against prevailing contemporary ideas of who was entitled to serve and hold power; namely the wealthy and educated, which very much non-coincidentally is largely the upper and middle classes. As an outside possibility I could see the Senate using sortition amongst a pool selected by each state legislature, but not the House.

Additionally, I think a government system that makes use of sortition like this, in the early American context, is going to necessitate a much longer duration for property qualifications. Those restrictions, even if removed for voting, would likely still remain as a way of excluding the masses and ensuring that the only people holding political power were from the elite.
 
Honestly, I think it would be most plausible as a means of picking high officials rather than for all elections.
I agree for tbe most part, with a few exceptions. I could totally see the electoral college selected this way, and possibly the Senate too (or at least, i could see a few states using sortition to choose senators), but I'm not so sure about the president himself being chosen by lottery, as I think they'd want a little more control and certainty. They could, however, use sortition to break a tie.
 
This probably ends up worse than OTL especially given the complex issues faced by legislators in the 18th and early 19th centuries - not to run down the intelligence of working people, but rather than education (especially the degree available of the era) was rarer. Remember, too, these folks had no conception of legislators as a full time job one could live off of. Outside income was presupposed. You'd have to, in my opinion, massively
 
This probably ends up worse than OTL especially given the complex issues faced by legislators in the 18th and early 19th centuries - not to run down the intelligence of working people, but rather than education (especially the degree available of the era) was rarer. Remember, too, these folks had no conception of legislators as a full time job one could live off of. Outside income was presupposed. You'd have to, in my opinion, massively

Massively...
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Sortition worked in ancient times, so there's no reason it can't work in the late 18th century. The easiest method would be to select local representatives by sortition, then select state representatives by sortition from amongst the local reprentatives, and then select delegates to the federal congress by sortition from amongst the state representatives. A tiered system, if you will. Makes it all rather easy.

Incidentally, I think that the kind of recall procedure that @metalinvader665 hinted at would likely be very limited in its scope. It messes with the whole concept of sortition, and besides... if a random neo-nazi gets elected in OTL, you can't just say "oh, you're not allowed here". Elected is elected, unless he actually breaks the law. And having nasty ideas does not break the law. So using the same logic, if a random nazi gets in via sortition, that just means there will be a random nazi among the representatives for that period. It's not like he's going to overthrow the government by his lonesome. He'll just be a pathetic crank, for others to mock.
 
Sortition worked in ancient times, so there's no reason it can't work in the late 18th century. The easiest method would be to select local representatives by sortition, then select state representatives by sortition from amongst the local reprentatives, and then select delegates to the federal congress by sortition from amongst the state representatives. A tiered system, if you will. Makes it all rather easy.

Those are for local municipals though. How would that work in a country of the US's scale, even back then? How is a Dutch-speaking farmer in Kinderhook, NY going to up and quit and head down to Washington, a "city" (not much more than the Capitol and a handful of farms at this point) in the middle of nowhere several hundred miles from home?
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Those are for local municipals though. How would that work in a country of the US's scale, even back then? How is a Dutch-speaking farmer in Kinderhook, NY going to up and quit and head down to Washington, a "city" (not much more than the Capitol and a handful of farms at this point) in the middle of nowhere several hundred miles from home?

For starters... how dd elected representatives? There were "ordinary people" in the Continental Congress and the early US Congress, after all. It wasn't just rich big-wigs, although those were over-represented by having sufficient funds to do just what you describe. There are various ways a sortition system could work, though.

-- One is rather obvious and likely, although unappealing to modern sensibilities of mass-democracy: a limited franchise, both active and passive. If a sortition system is implemented, it seems very likely to me that in many counties/states, only "men of property and good standing" will even be allowed to participate in the sortition. So... property qualifications to keep the riff-raff out. (Those kind of qualifications were rather common under the OTl system as well, at that time.)

-- A second, more inclusive option would be for every county to have a modest fund for whichever representative gets sorted to go to the state level, and for the state to have a similar fund available for whoever gets sorted to represent that state on the federal level. This isn't even so insane by the day's standards, since there was a fear of politicians being bought by special interests. If all randomly sorted representatives get a fixed stipend, you at least know they won't be forced to go begging for money from private parties. (In fact, political donations might be universally outlawed if such a system of stipends could be set up...)

Of course, both options might also be combined, with certain qualifications existing in most places, but the stipend system ensuring that most relatively "common" people could indeed function as representatives, so that the qualifications can typically be rather lax. I'm sure there are also other methods to make a sortition system viable, besides what I'm suggesting here.
 
I don't see the president being picked this way. Not a chance.

You could use sortition of state legislators to pick your house of representatives or your electoral college.

Given the mindset of the time, there is not going to be a significant office that doesn't have some elective component to it.
 
The franchise was so restrictive in those days it was a form of sortition. White male citizens who owned land... & Only those of that group who actually voted.
 
For starters... how dd elected representatives? There were "ordinary people" in the Continental Congress and the early US Congress, after all. It wasn't just rich big-wigs, although those were over-represented by having sufficient funds to do just what you describe. There are various ways a sortition system could work, though.

Most of the regular folk started that way and then ascended to other offices and then to Congress (and then often back to the statehouse afterwards).

I would also add that Congressional pay in 1789 was a $6 per diem. That's not going to work for a lot of people
 
I agree for tbe most part, with a few exceptions. I could totally see the electoral college selected this way, and possibly the Senate too (or at least, i could see a few states using sortition to choose senators), but I'm not so sure about the president himself being chosen by lottery, as I think they'd want a little more control and certainty. They could, however, use sortition to break a tie.

My thinking with selecting the President via sortition is that eligibility for the position would be restricted to electors, and hence, to people who already had the influence/wealth/prominence to be an elector. Which would, coincidentally, be a much more important position in this scenario than it is in OTL. Basically, the idea is that you have a qualified pool of people who, at least theoretically, have been chosen by the people and are choosing one of them to serve as President. However, the office woud be far more a first-among-equals type institution than the OTL Presidency ever was. It would also make the Cabinet positions vastly more powerful and important and the same with the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore. In the absence of a strong Presidency the other positions will consequently be more influential.
 
I would also add that Congressional pay in 1789 was a $6 per diem. That's not going to work for a lot of people

If you compare it to wages at the time, it goes pretty far. According to this, in 1785-1800 in Philadelphia, carpenters made about $1/day and painters and plasterers made 80-85 cents/day, so $6/day was 6-8x typical wages for a skilled laborer in a proper major city. The modern equivalent (base this figure of $22.95 per hour for union carpenter wages) would be about $1100/day.
 
If you compare it to wages at the time, it goes pretty far. According to this, in 1785-1800 in Philadelphia, carpenters made about $1/day and painters and plasterers made 80-85 cents/day, so $6/day was 6-8x typical wages for a skilled laborer in a proper major city. The modern equivalent (base this figure of $22.95 per hour for union carpenter wages) would be about $1100/day.

did they meet full time?
 
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