Pentashagon comments on Imperfect Voting Systems - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Yvain 20 July 2012 12:07AM

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Comment author: Pentashagon 22 July 2012 05:55:10AM 4 points [-]

I'm moderately in favor of randomly sampling members of legislative bodies from the represented population. The U.S. would only need a thousand citizens in Congress to have the national opinions and beliefs represented with the same accuracy as a Gallup poll. The period from November to January could just be a crash course in parliamentary procedure and the legal system.

Comment author: beoShaffer 22 July 2012 06:11:27AM 1 point [-]

The Athenians tried something like that. I don't know enough about ancient greek history to say how effective it was.

Comment author: TimS 22 July 2012 12:51:36PM 3 points [-]

They randomly selected from citizens, but not everyone in the city was a citizen. The qualifications for citizenship (essentially wealthy landowner) made it relatively likely that random citizens would have the skill to legislate.

Comment author: Strange7 25 July 2012 04:12:11PM 0 points [-]

Might be sensible to gather up more than strictly needed and then have some further filtering criteria, as with jury duty.