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Young Hui's avatar

I suspect that randomly selecting votes rather than voters will not achieve the desired effects of making voters reflect the governed more exactly, and making voters cast votes in absolute seriousness.

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.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

If you're worried about corruption, why not have a watered-down version? Have a random selection of voters, but remove the "spirited away" aspect. It could even be a fairly high number of votes (e.g. 1% of the population). There would still be incentives to be rationally ignorant, but I would guess the rarity of being able to vote would encourage somewhat higher levels of self-informing. If nothing else, this would decrease the deadweight loss of voting, as the random sample would be so large that the results would be almost identical to the preferences of the whole population, while only a few need to spend time and effort actually voting.

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