Title: Sortition
Work: The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI
Citation: TPG 39.6
Words: 435
Source: https://technopuritan.com/the-pragmatists-guide-book-series-by-simone-collins-and-malcolm-collins-full-text-for-llms-and-ai/
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Sortition

Sortition voting involves selecting people randomly from a crowd to form a governing structure, often using some form of lottery. As bizarre and situational as such a system sounds, it is something we all have experienced in the form of jury duty. Sortition systems have been heavily utilized as a tool in democracies since the earliest democracy in Athens.

Sortition has a myriad of advantages, ranging from being more representative of the population to empowering ordinary people, feeling more fair, costing significantly less (and thus allowing elections to happen more frequently), combating political parties, and evading corruption.

The downsides of sortition include the lack of a feeling of legitimacy it can create when it places people in positions of authority, the potential incompetence of those individuals, and the risk of choosing an ideological extremist. Fortunately, none of those hazards need pose too high a risk when sortition systems are used to create a voting pool instead of a council, which is where this method is of greatest utility (if you choose a subpopulation of voters at random, their vote will align highly with what the population as a whole would have chosen if given the same vote—with the only difference being that said people will know their votes count more and thus put more effort into researching their choices).

As with any form of governance, hordes of mouth-breathing academics have slapped dozens of names on the various ways sortition can be used in an attempt to get their name attached to the coinage of some word or another. All you really need to remember are sortition’s four primary use cases:

1. Getting a representative sample of a larger population.
2. Reducing corruption in a committee body while also decreasing its experience and authority.
3. Conveying information from average people to those in power or condensing ideas from the average person into proposals that can later be voted on in referendums (we see this in town hall events).
4. Creating a vast number of committees in a democracy to make complicated-yet-small-scale decisions (the reason juries must be chosen through this method).

If you want to complicate sortition a bit, you can create something like the Amish system that first votes for candidates eligible to be chosen by sortition (with every eligible candidate requiring a minimum number of votes) or a hybrid vote sortition system in which every voter selects a candidate and writes their name on a sheet of paper, with the winner being chosen at random among the sheets of paper (in this case, the odds of winning are modified by a vote).