election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto)
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"statistically random" does not define the constituencies from which the samples are being drawn. That is a political question, not a mathematical one.
we don't define the constituency, the office does. a senate seat samples the state, a house seat the district, the presidency the nation. same electorate that would have voted in the election we're replacing. sampling inherits the frame, it doesn't invent one, so there's no political choice here that elections don't already make.
What stops those representatives from adjusting the manner in which future jurors are sampled?
nothing in particular, and that's true of every policy. you can ask "what stops them from changing it" about any rule, then about whatever entrenches that rule, forever. that's how you win and hold a policy, which is strategy, a separate axis from what the policy should be. i'm arguing the target.
now the actual disagreement, stated plainly. you want to weight some votes more than others by group membership. start with the criteria: who picks which groups get the multiplier, and on what basis? every answer is arbitrary and gameable. worse, the criterion tracks the wrong thing. if the concern is welfare, welfare is individual. utility, insofar as it can be affected by wealth/redistribution (the primary government policy lever) is roughly log(wealth), so a dollar is worth far more to a poor person than a rich one. group label is a terrible proxy for that, and weighting by it means a millionaire in the favored group outvotes a poor person outside it. you'd hand extra power to the people who need help least.
one person one vote equalizes the only thing that should be equal, which is standing. 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. then you meet real needs directly. financial disadvantage goes to transfers. concentrated harm goes to compensation. liberties go to a rights floor. non-market claims like sovereignty go to subsidiarity, a boundary rather than a vote multiplier. none of it touches the franchise.
so the burden sits in one place: name an interest that no transfer, right, compensation, or boundary can serve, and that vote-weighting can. i don't think one exists. every interest weighting claims to serve is better served by the direct tool, and unlike weighting, the direct tool doesn't hand a multiplier to the people who need help least or sit there waiting to be gamed. equal franchise stands because nothing is left for unequal franchise to do.
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@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.
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there's nothing to "agree" with. it's just objectively true. compulsory voting solves demographic disparities between the electorate and actual society, and forced exposure to omni-partisan presentation by the candidates addresses epistemic uncertainty as much as is possible.
It has to be better than the default current system where everyone gets to vote.
and it obviously is, dramatically so, in essentially every way.
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@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@toby-pereira
On reading the manifesto, I would still need to think this is something I might agree with to read it allthere's nothing to "agree" with. it's just objectively true. compulsory voting solves demographic disparities between the electorate and actual society, and forced exposure to omni-partisan presentation by the candidates addresses epistemic uncertainty as much as is possible.
It has to be better than the default current system where everyone gets to vote.
and it obviously is, dramatically so.
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
this is confusion. i'm saying that the decision of where to spend one's resources is heavily a function of viability. my election by jury proposal isn't yet making a statement about viability or what policy you should invest your scarce resources into. it's about the fact that it's a good policy, period.
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@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.
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“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.
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Equal sampling within each resulting constituency does not settle which constituencies should exist.
of course not. it's a completely separate issue, and outside the scope of mechanism design. people can choose which tribe to form with which other actors however they prefer. they might want to secede. not a mechanism issue, but a political preference issue.
given you have whatever factions you have, the question those groups want to know is, what's the best mechanism for us to create policies? it's obviously EBJ.
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@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.