Functional Lottocracy
Hi All,
I first saw the Vsauce video on Lottocracy 5-years ago and my buddy and I came up with a framework to institute a form of Lottocracy in America that I wanted to share here.
Rather than completely throw out our current system in favor of random elections. We thought about how to blend the two. What we came up with is essentially another "layer" of government that would sit on top of Congress. When Congress passes a law, instead of a Presidential veto, there would be a lottocratic veto. Each time a new law is passed, a group of 100 people would be randomly selected from a pool of all eligible voters in the US (you could do 1 person randomly from each state and then 50 picked from the whole population). They would be flown to a 5-star government resort in the middle of the country for 3 days where experts and legislators would come inform them about the bill and the situation/pitch their side. On the third day, they would finish deliberations and vote Yes/No on whether they want to pass the bill. After the bill is passed or vetoed all those people can go home and a new group of 100 is selected for the next bill.
Rather than a fully lottocratic government, this is much more similar to the jury system. Trip is fully covered by the government and hotel resort is nice, but completely locked down to limit outside influence. You could make additional tweaks like lowering the threshold to pass bills in Congress to 30-40% to try to incentivize simpler bills. Ideally this would allow for single-issue bills because you wouldn't need to add tons of thing just to get one more vote and allow for more frequent bills to address current problems.
Other advantages would be taking veto power away from the Executive Branch which could help rebalance the power differential between the branches. Also, corporations would have less of an influence over decisions being made and decisions would better reflect the will of the people. Lastly, it would give the average American much more buy-in to the government. Within a few years most people would know someone who had been selected who could then explain why they voted for or against something. This could help reverse the intense divisiveness in America by getting people in the same room, dialoguing and making decisions together rather than arguing through screens.
Like anything, this isn't a perfect system, but I really believe this would be a better system than our current one and a huge step in the right direction. Curious to get some feedback and hear if you guys think this is more viable than a pure sortition system.