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The Case for Abolishing Elections

78 点作者 haakonhr超过 2 年前

33 条评论

captainmuon超过 2 年前
I think it is nonsense to try to fix politics by making it even more arbitrary.<p>The biggest problem in the US is the electorial system that leads to two parties with each close to 50%. Elections are so close that it is essentially meaningless. Is a party with 50.1% really more legitimized to rule than the one with 49.9%?<p>Step one to fix democracy would be to get rid of the winner-takes-all system. Not only would this make more than two parties viable. You would also fix that most of the country&#x27;s vote doesn&#x27;t contribute at all (since people live in &quot;safe&quot; counties where they have little influence on the outcome.)<p>Then, when elections are won with clear margins, yes, you could abolish elections, and replace them by representative polls! The benefit is that polls are much cheaper, you can do them much more frequently, and the people can change bad policy quicker. It might be controversial, but I like that you can also apply &quot;reweighting&quot; to polls to make them more representative.
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chadcmulligan超过 2 年前
Reminds me of a short story by Asimov - Franchise<p>from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Franchise_(short_story)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Franchise_(short_story)</a> (Spoilers!)<p>In the future, the United States has converted to an &quot;electronic democracy&quot; where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.<p>The story centers around Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, the man chosen as &quot;Voter of the Year&quot; in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed.<p>However, after &quot;voting&quot;, he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, &quot;exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise&quot; – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens did not actually get to vote; even he himself did not vote for any candidate, law, or issue.<p>The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I&#x27;s correct prediction of the result of the U.S. presidential election in 1952.[1]
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benmmurphy超过 2 年前
Sortition is also much easier to protect from fraud than voting. Generating shared randomness in a way that can’t be rigged is a straight forward well studied problem. For example everyone who wants to take part generates a random value and publishes a public pre-commitment. Then all the random values are revealed, checked against the pre-commitments and xor’d to produce the final random value. All of this can be verified by a member of the public and any member of the public could take part.<p>Issues around rigging the electoral roll are less of an issue than in voting because the person selected has to show up to do their job. It is far less effective to have dead people on the electoral roll because someone will need to impersonate the dead person if they are selected.
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brianolson超过 2 年前
They&#x27;re suggesting &#x27;government by jury&#x27;, but what I expect it will turn out to be is &#x27;government by the permanent bureaucracy&#x27;. The staffers who are there all the time will make suggestions to the current jury that is making decisions, and those decisions will probably 90% go with what the staffers suggest.
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causality0超过 2 年前
I&#x27;ve held this view for a long time, since the day I realized the average politician was morally inferior to the average citizen.
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BMc2020超过 2 年前
<i>The revelation came while Bouricius was working on a housing committee. “The committee members were an outgoing and garrulous bunch,” he observed. “Shy wallflowers almost never become legislators.” More disturbing, he noted how his fellow politicians—all of whom owned their homes—tended to legislate in favor of landlords and against tenants. “I saw that the experiences and beliefs of legislators shape legislation far more than facts,” he said. “After that, I frequently commented that any 150 Vermonters pulled from the phone book would be more representative than the elected House membership.”</i>
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ZeroGravitas超过 2 年前
I quite like sortition and citizens assemblies, but it&#x27;s amazing how much pushback there is to even minor moves towards further democracy (proportional representation etc.) and how much energy is spent undermining the limited democracy that exists so I feel uncomfortable with the headline.
szundi超过 2 年前
If this system is established, the corruption will come in pretty fast into this one too. Even easier because there is just so few people to influence in short time.
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pjc50超过 2 年前
I&#x27;d like to see sortition tried somewhere, but not as a full replacement for elections. Maybe it would be a good replacement for the House of Lords.
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sfgd超过 2 年前
Ancient India has several instances where the next ruler was selected by the royal elephant. Of course, it was not meant to be random, as the elephant would pick a righteous person capable of steering the kingdom at that time.
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nemo44x超过 2 年前
Yeah let’s appoint leadership that on day 1 asks “what should we do?”. What could go wrong there?<p>Love it or hate it but a minority of better organized elites will always run the show in every organization from a local bake sale to government.
throwawaaarrgh超过 2 年前
Iirc, the electoral college and representatives were put in place because the [rich] founders knew the Demos can not be trusted to fairly govern itself. Election by lottery is not better because it&#x27;s the same people with the same foibles.<p>When the Greeks did sortition, it wasn&#x27;t perfect either. Laws ended up favoring the richest landowners, and the richest landowners tended to have a higher representation (in the boule anyway). They tried various means to engineer the problems away, but they persisted. This is because it&#x27;s nigh-impossible to prevent human beings from figuring out a way to exploit a system when they are committed to the task.<p>Another way to have a superior political body is to make it superior and hold it to a standard. Rather than select average people, there should be basic requirements of intelligence, ethics, acts of good will, and the abandonment of luxuries, rewards and favors, in exchange for the support of the state. The state should support the education of the populous toward this end. In addition, the judgment over matters of serious concern should be presided over by experts. No decision of serious concern should be made without a meta-study, to root out bias and find the best possible solution.<p>Basically, we should hold ourselves and our political process to the highest standards, rather than the easiest ones. Let the noblest and wisest lead us in a structure designed for reason and fairness.
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kkfx超过 2 年前
I suggest to rediscover from the Condorcet paradox to the classic renaissance Italian city-states structure to the classic Athens demagogues: any system can be abused.<p>Then try finding an old book and a very old story: &quot;The Science of Government Founded on Natural Law&quot; by Clinton Roosevelt a relative of the much better known Franklin Delano and one of the scammers of the NY bank who became the FED years later [1] or the blatant explanation that all society develop a kind of hierarchy who is not at all democratic (nor meritocratic) who drive and (ab)use the others not differently than a shepherd with the flock. Sometimes the shepherd is soft and hidden enough that the flock do not revolt, sometimes it&#x27;s not and get assaulted by the flock, sometimes it have to create a bit of theater, like wrestling, pushing the flock to think there are different ideas into play, they decide etc. The modern version of ancient Greeks theater where the orator start to plead a cause, convincing spectators who acclaim, than start to plead the exact opposite, in equally convincing manners. Those who understand applaud, those who not think he&#x2F;she made fun of them and try to assault physically...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage-history.com&#x2F;index.php?c=read&amp;author=carr&amp;book=pawns&amp;story=american" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage-history.com&#x2F;index.php?c=read&amp;author=car...</a> the scam is well described by one of the scammers letter, itemized at the end of the long page for those who are curious.
choeger超过 2 年前
While random choice has some merit, it ignores some basic requirements of legislation: Legislation is interfacing with the executive and judicial branches (and you definitely don&#x27;t want to randomly select your judges and governors). This interface works through legalese and other techniques. So someone with a certain experience or training in these techniques will be able to write better laws. Also, legislation necessarily works through specialization and work in committees. That&#x27;s another thing people can learn to do better. That&#x27;s where political parties are actually useful.<p>Finally, this whole thing reeks of identity politics. Representation as a proxy of good decision making or even just good intent. But think about what this would do to minorities. It would be quite unlikely to chose, e.g., transsexuals or people with rare illnesses. Also, people have many different identies at the same time but but cannot represent them all equally well, anyways. So some aspects of society wouldn&#x27;t be represented at all during a legislative period because everyone is supposed to represent their own identities, not someone else&#x27;s.<p>So unless we create a legislative assembly that&#x27;s so large that it borders on direct democracy, I don&#x27;t see the benefit. And in that case, let&#x27;s just have direct democracy. If necessary with a legal requirement to vote.
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jongjong超过 2 年前
I think democracy by lottery may be a good idea provided that the outcome of the lottery can be trusted. It could be done through a cryptographically-verifiable (e.g. blockchain-based) random number generator.<p>The average citizen is more principled and less prone to corruption than the average modern politician. I don&#x27;t think it would be a problem if politicians ended up more naive as a result. Just having well-meaning politicians would be a significant step up.<p>That said, I think we should rely less on government intervention in the economy. We need to fix the monetary system to provide a level playing field, then once that&#x27;s done, we need to trim back regulations. The way to solve the corporate monopolization problem is through increased competition. The government&#x27;s primary role should be to promote maximum decentralization.<p>The government should not concern itself with equality of outcomes; it should only concern itself with equality of opportunities. It should not think about efficiency; it should trust the free market to take care of that.
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mintaka5超过 2 年前
make it like jury duty. randomly select taxpayers to represent people for short terms. i&#x27;d prefer a random concerned citizen making decisions for a month over 2&#x2F;4 years of a corruptible do-nothing elitist. keep the representation constantly rotating. more people is more ideas, more consensus, and closer to reality for most of us &lt;---
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atemerev超过 2 年前
Oh come on. We already have a working system: direct democracy. An entire well-developed country works like this: Switzerland (and quite successfully). I absolutely do not understand why it is not adopted elsewhere (except politicians egos, of course, and this is quite a strong force to overcome).
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duxup超过 2 年前
I wonder how hard is it to pay off random people?<p>Also who writes what could be complex legislation for complex issues?
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Synaesthesia超过 2 年前
We need councils running everything, democratically elected councils whose members are instantly recallable upon a vote. That will ensure they are responsive to the needs of people.
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Gud超过 2 年前
The problem is how limited peoples power really is. Voting every four years for a “representative “ is not enough. Look for Swiss style direct democracy
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christkv超过 2 年前
This is what I’ve always supported because it kills political parties dead and their corrupting influence.
zzzeek超过 2 年前
It pains me greatly to not be sarcastic about this but I cannot help but think this article would not be making it to the front page of HN a day after the Democrats clinched the Senate majority, had the midterm elections favored the Republican party as everyone expected.
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lo_zamoyski超过 2 年前
“They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.”<p>― T.S. Eliot, The Rock
tardismechanic超过 2 年前
I first heard about Sortition on lovely QI: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YNzGT0h6A64" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YNzGT0h6A64</a>
valeg超过 2 年前
It may work in local elections but nation wide elections require the popular mandate. Humans like to believe that they have a stake in the system, however small.
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imtringued超过 2 年前
How about both? People can vote for a party or sortition. Since all parties now have a common threat they are more likely to cooperate.
andrewstuart超过 2 年前
I like the idea of expendable democratic power. It works something like this:<p>Each voter gets say (for example) 1,000 votes, which they allocate to whichever parties they want at election time.<p>The number of votes a party gets become its “currency”.<p>Any political party can put forward legislation to become law. They back their legislation with some number of their votes&#x2F;currency.<p>Other parties can defeat legislation by spending a greater number of their votes to stop it.<p>When a party has spent all its votes&#x2F;currency, it must wait till the next election to get more.
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at_a_remove超过 2 年前
How swiftly the meme has changed from &quot;If we don&#x27;t win, democracy dies!&quot; to &quot;Since we didn&#x27;t win, let&#x27;s get rid of elections!&quot; See also &quot;Our candidate didn&#x27;t win because of the electoral college, so let&#x27;s get rid of that&quot; and &quot;Let&#x27;s make people vote on Brexit again, since they voted wrong the last time.&quot;<p>These people are almost charmingly shameless. Rather than do better, they just want to put the fix in for the next time.
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rplst8超过 2 年前
If the candidates that are put up in the general aren&#x27;t what people want, why did they win the primary?
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ericol超过 2 年前
Disclaimer: I don&#x27;t live in the US.<p>Gerrymandering, yo.<p>This is _such_ a US centric view. Guys, you have way a worst problem than elections. You have a party strongly pursuing getting rid of democratic results altogether.<p>Beyond the stated (That G word) the republican party is STRONGLY preparing the landscape to not recognize the results of the next election (Or the next one after that).<p>I actually have a bet with a friend about when the last democratic election is going to happen, and my money is on this last midterms being the ones (Gotta reckon, I wasn&#x27;t expecting Gen-Z, and I&#x27;m gladly surprised I might be wrong).<p>Take for instance the last election in Brazil, where Lula beat Bolzonaro by the bare minimum: 51% to 49%. What would had been the results of such an election in the US? In 2016, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, and _still_ Trump won the presidential race. In 2020, even thought Biden wan the popular vote by a large margin, the results were still down to a handful of votes [1]<p>The problem, as I see it, is that you have a democratic system that allows for suppressing democracy.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;940689086&#x2F;narrow-wins-in-these-key-states-powered-biden-to-the-presidency" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;940689086&#x2F;narrow-wins-in-thes...</a>
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account-5超过 2 年前
Sounds like demarchy to me.
mberning超过 2 年前
At this point a philosopher king sounds way better to me.
julienreszka超过 2 年前
Anybody&#x27;s who gives this idea more than a minute of thought quickly finds out this is utter nonsense.
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