Are there any methods for selecting important public officials from large populations that are arguably much better than the current standards as practiced in various modern democracies?
For instance in actual vote tallying like Condorcet seem to have huge advantages over simple plurality or runoff systems, and yet it is rarely used. Are there similar big gains to be made in the systems that leads up to a vote, or avoids one entirely?
For instance, a couple ideas:
What other fun or crazy systems (that are at least somewhat defensible) are out there?
Multilevel voting rounds have the problem that they end up representing elite interests to a very unhealthy degree - round one is likely to select representatives with impressive accomplishments and credentials. Which means the pool of voters for subsequent votes is now more or less entirely from the very top social strata, and as such is not likely to elect leadership responsive to needs of the people. This is not just theory- it has been tried, and the results were bad.
The one I would actually like to see tried is rotating sortition. Representatives ar...
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