Discover more from Overcoming Bias
The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …
The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.
To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day. All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.
More here. This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept. Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?
My guess: aside from status quo bias, it just doesn’t feel like the political ideal in the back of our minds – how our nomadic forager ancestors long ago would meet every few months to make major band decisions. All 5-15 men could talk, they wouldn’t break until they’d all had their say, decisions were by informal consensus of all, and dissenters could leave the band.
National Juries
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.
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.