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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

@clay I read through most of your manifesto

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I did also read through most of it, even if I did miss one or two things!

@jack-waugh I agree with @clay here. I think acceptance of this is gaining traction.

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/495/approval-voting-as-a-workable-compromise/54

@clay I read through most of your manifesto, and I can get behind the proposal. You make clear arguments for the principles and goals. I think @Toby-Pereira‘s concerns are better calibrated to the issue than mine were, specifically about the information environment. That’s an implementation question, not necessarily a question about the goal.

Another practical implementation concern I have is auditing. By having everybody able to vote, there is no worry about manipulating juror selection.

@clay

“sampling inherits the frame, it doesn’t invent one, so there’s no political choice here that elections don’t already make.”

It inherits a political choice rather than eliminating one. Which constituency belongs to an office, which offices are territorial, which decisions are made at the district, state, or national level, and where the relevant boundaries lie are all politically consequential choices.

I agree that, conditional on a fixed office and electorate, uniform random sampling does not introduce an additional weighting rule. My point is that the frame cannot simply be treated as fixed. For example, a state could use one statewide jury, separate district juries, or some combination in which territorial units receive guaranteed representation. Those arrangements can give different populations different effective influence even when sampling is uniform within every unit.

“start with the criteria: who picks which groups get the multiplier, and on what basis?”

I am not necessarily proposing demographic vote multipliers. District-based representation is an institutional partition of constituencies and authority. The relevant questions are who determines those partitions, what interests justify them, and how resistant they are to strategic manipulation.

You later place sovereignty and other non-market claims under “subsidiarity, a boundary rather than a vote multiplier.” But that seems to concede the central point: boundaries are required to represent some politically relevant interests, and choosing those boundaries is itself a political process. Equal sampling within each resulting constituency does not settle which constituencies should exist.

“it’s the single rule that needs no authority to rank persons against each other, and the only one you’d accept without knowing which group you land in.”

That establishes an argument for equal inclusion probabilities within a specified constituency. It does not establish that a population-wide constituency is always the appropriate unit, or that future juries would retain the inherited allocation of authority and boundaries. A jury could conclude that geographically concentrated interests require district-like representation and reconstruct those strata without rejecting equal standing among persons.

@clay I think framing your argument less categorically would help it gain traction. You may be fully convinced by the proposal, but saying that there is “nothing to agree with,” that it is “objectively true,” and that its superiority is obvious bypasses the points that other people are actually disputing.

Some of your claims may follow once particular premises and goals are accepted. But whether those are the right premises, whether the proposed system achieves its goals, and whether its tradeoffs are acceptable are all matters that require collective judgment. They cannot simply be removed from disagreement by describing the conclusion as objective.

@Toby-Pereira‘a point about the manifesto is also reasonable. People generally need some reason to think a proposal is promising before investing the time required to study its full presentation. A forum discussion can provide that reason by introducing the argument incrementally and addressing the objections people raise from their current understanding.

I mention this because I have previously presented developed ideas here as finished packages and expected others to absorb the entire framework before engaging with them. I found that much less effective than establishing the premises one at a time and allowing the argument to develop through discussion.

@clay said in Merits and Demerits of Compulsory Voting:

@toby-pereira no if you want to understand it it's best for you to read the manifesto.

In any case, if they're not in a bubble, they will still be exposed to biased media.

so are normal voters.

you have not stated a better system.

On reading the manifesto, I would still need to think this is something I might agree with to read it all, because I'm not going to read everyone's manifesto on everything. While I got the bubble bit wrong, I think I largely have a basic understanding of it in any case, especially after you corrected me.

Yes, normal voters are exposed to biased media too, but this suggests that the difference between jurors and normal voters might not be so great.

It has to be better than the default current system where everyone gets to vote. It's not about suggesting another alternative. There may be some ways in which the jury system would produce better results, and I can see that, but for this to get traction, it would have to be considerably better and seen to be so, in order to offset the view that this would eliminate most people's democratic rights.

In your piece about the only voting reform worth funding that was posted on this forum the other day, you pointed out that it's not about the best method. "It’s a function of which method gets adopted, times how much better off people are when it does."

So I think approval voting, but allowing everyone to vote seems a better option overall.

@clay but “statistically random” does not define the constituencies from which the samples are being drawn. That is a political question, not a mathematical one.

As a thought experiment, suppose a jury itself were ideally representative in whatever sense is considered, and that they elected representatives. What stops those representatives from ultimately adjusting the manner in which future jurors are sampled? Especially, for example, if the question of stratification were raised as a political issue for jurors to consider, as it likely would be.

I think you should raise this as a separate topic here so we can all engage in a more organized way.

@clay “ which compromises true representativeness.” This is perhaps close to my point—representativeness of what, exactly? Individual people, yes. Stratified, complex political concerns of varying urgency or importance, I would say no.

You’re right that some strata are arbitrary. But what about strata that are not arbitrary, but are functionally, territorially or even historically meaningful?

@clay I won’t inquire about your latest arguments here yet but only indicate that this is a forum for discussion and dialogue, so my preference is that we should try to keep our responses measured in volume and pace so that questions can be addressed. I will read your response and perhaps manifesto soon, but my first impression is that we should build these ideas communally and incrementally, one principle at a time.

I hope you know I am not dismissing or rejecting your ideas, but just engaging with them with immediately available bandwidth and the surface-level questions and concerns that come to mind under those constraints.

For example, I don’t agree that stratified representation is intrinsically bad. When implemented well, it can provide representation for minorities and other constituencies that are politically important and have unique functional and territorial needs despite small population, such as farmers or rural areas.

@clay sampling can be stratified. Most large scale political systems have negotiated systems of stratified representation, because population doesn’t always reflect importance of political concerns.

I feel this should be a separate discussion. But my point is, if you admit stratified representation as almost all political systems do, I would wonder why we should randomly sample jurors from fine-grained constituencies rather than letting those constituencies elect their jurors.