Unless it’s paired with mandatory voting, randomly selecting votes will not make the general populace more inclined to vote in the first place, as there will still be the problem that people would not perceive the influence of their vote. Indeed, it might make the problem worse because the expected effect of any single vote will be even less than before. (Before it was one over the total number of voters; now it’s that ratio times the probability that it will even be counted.)

The effect of randomly choosing voters (not votes), on the other hand, is that any citizen is equally likely to be chosen (while choosing votes still privileges those who can bother/afford the time to vote). Secondly, the voters that are chosen should cast their votes with orders of magnitude greater seriousness and consideration, presumably making political gimmicks far less effective.

In short, the advantages random voter selection offers are that the voters will more accurately reflect the governed, and that votes will be cast only in full seriousness.

The folks with political power are just those who benefit most from the current voting system.

In addition, US politics in general has a large inertial aspect. Four years ago, no one would have thought a libertarian candidate had a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning the presidency. A few weeks ago, Ron Paul handily won the CPAC presidential straw poll. Do you think that the US has become significantly more libertarian in the last four years? I don’t. Rather, I think libertarians learned just how many libertarians there were, and decided to vote libertarian instead of strategically voting for more mainstream candidates.

Instead of status quo bias, try game theory. Right now most libertarians/alternative voting system fans are hunting rabbit, and it’s perfectly rational for them to continue hunting rabbit unless they have evidence that many others are or will be hunting stag. Even if the stag hunt does not apply to the voting systems problem (i.e. there is some way of implementing the national jury without electing any candidates through plurality voting), the fact that the stag hunt does apply to plurality voting has conditioned folks to believe that only ideas that enjoy lots of support are worth supporting.

You say voters have no influence now, which I think means two things: 1) the odds of any given vote swinging an outcome are pretty remote, and 2) most people don’t much care for the system we’ve got now, yet it persists.

For 1, if we replace elections with juries, groups, however large, will be just as unable to swing elections as individuals are, because there will be no elections to swing. You might say they’re going to be represented in proportion to their size in the juries, but represented or not you have everyone sitting helplessly, acted upon rather than acting; subjects, not free citizens. Waiting passively is both infuriating (as it should be, if someone chose it for you), and corrupting; virtue pertains to action. You might now say that freedom and virtue are hazy, unquantifiable god-terms, but they are no more so than whatever value you’re trying to maximize.

For 2, this is partly a signaling issue: if you say you like the status quo you sound like a simple-minded sheep, but if you don’t like it you have higher standards and an independent mind. But this will always be the case no matter what the status quo happens to be, and people implicitly realize that, which is why they go around saying things like “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” It doesn’t necessarily mean real disaffection. To the extent that people are genuinely disaffected with our current politics, what they have in mind is more popular control, not less, and getting there is largely a coordination problem.

If you think juries preferable, then obviously you think that voting does matter. You just think it’s for the worse. I say, to the contrary, being the active agents in our own government is more than worth letting some ill-informed people vote.

Grant, we think we understand why chiefdoms naturally displaced tribes due to military advantages and capital accumulation. Now that we are rich we can indulge our inherited preferences.

That sounds plausible, but is there evidence that these preferences are inherited?

On the other hand, if you could sell it as an unfortunate but necessary reaction to all that corrupting money spent on politics by all those evil special interests, then it might have some chance.

If it ever happens, I’d expect post-election retaliation against jurors. I’d invest in a big “I Didn’t Vote” button.

When people vote they don’t think of it like a political economist or a mathematician studying voter theory. They roughly approximate the process as the creation and exercise of a mythical ‘collective will’ or ‘will of the people.’

(Personally, I am skeptical of the idea of collective will…but that’s another discussion).

Voting rules are part of the guts of the system and in order to explain why they produce the results they do first you have to disabuse voters of the the myth of a collective will. This is counter-intuitive, evolutionarily novel, and therefore costly and difficult.

The people that do understand what happens in the sausage factory generally have a vested interest in some close variant of the status quo continuing either

(1) because they benefit directly through resources or power
(2) their expert knowledge (and thus status) are reliant on the system staying the same

In summary, the cost of understanding the problem is high and the people that could make it happen don’t want to. Therefore, high ignorance and high status-quo-bias (as in most ‘ignorant’ or poorly educated communities/cultures).

Similarly, people have a lot of trouble getting their head around population dynamics, ecology, and economics. These are all systems where the interactions of many small fairly unpredictable particles interact to produce emergent (but often non-linear) order. It is very expensive cognitively to understand this versus the first approximation which is linear and which sees the world as intentional/agent-based.