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title: "Many people want better governance, no matter who is charge.  Random…"
date: 2021-01-09
source: facebook
type: Archer T. Ships shared a link.
---

# Many people want better governance, no matter who is charge.  Random…

*January 9, 2021 · Facebook*

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[https://www.wired.com/2012/05/st-essay-voting/](https://www.wired.com/2012/05/st-essay-voting/){target="_blank"}
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Many people want better governance, no matter who is charge. Random sample voting is an important technology for improving governance, because it would incentivize voters to learn about the issues, and make a careful decision.\
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\"2000 years ago, the citizens of Athens developed a concept of democracy that\'s still hailed by the modern world. It was not, however, a democracy in which every citizen had a vote. Aristotle argued that such a practice would lead to an oligarchy, where powerful individuals would unduly influence the masses. Instead the Athenians relied on a simple machine to randomly select citizens for office. It\'s an idea whose time has come again.\
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Two separate research initiatives---one from a pioneering cryptographer and a second from a team based at Stanford University---have proposed a return to this purer, Athenian-style democracy. Rather than expect everyone to vote, both proposals argue, we should randomly select an anonymous subset of electors from among registered voters. Their votes would then be extrapolated to the wider population. Think of it as voting via statistically valid sample. With a population of 313 million, the US would need about 100,000 voters to deliver a reliable margin of error.\
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Such proposals can inspire horror. But the fact is, one man, one vote is broken. In the last presidential race, nearly 40 percent of the voting-eligible population didn\'t cast a ballot. And that was a good year, with the highest turnout since 1964. If we select fewer people to vote, we can get a better representation of what the country wants.\
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At the same time that turnout is low, the issues put to voters are increasingly complex. States ask voters to decide on issues ranging from drug laws to arcane budget rules. In 2010 California voters were asked to decide on 14 such propositions, in addition to choosing candidates for local, state, and federal office. Few people have enough time to make thoughtful decisions, so these important questions are decided based on snap judgments and 30-second TV ads. James Fishkin, director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford, argues that our system isn\'t living up to its democratic potential: \"There is so little time for deliberation that some people make leadership choices based on whether they like a candidate\'s hairstyle.\
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The concept shouldn\'t be so shocking. Every time we take a drug that\'s been through clinical trials, we tacitly accept that the experience of a small group is applicable to the overall population. And we rely on randomly selected citizens to serve on juries, where they make life-and-death decisions. Jurors are given the time they need to analyze the issues. Why wouldn\'t we want the same thing for important local and national issues?\"\
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[https://www.wired.com/2012/05/st-essay-voting/](https://www.wired.com/2012/05/st-essay-voting/){target="_blank"}\
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More detail in the white paper here:\
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[https://rsvoting.org/whitepaper/white_paper.pdf](https://rsvoting.org/whitepaper/white_paper.pdf){target="_blank"}
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