Posts made by cfrank

In a recent discussion of an election-by-jury proposal, a broader question arose concerning the nature of political representation:

May an office legitimately represent constituent political units, communities, or federated bodies, or must legitimate representation ultimately be based only on individual persons represented directly and on an equal basis?

The immediate discussion can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/623/election-by-jury-www-electionbyjury-com-manifesto/40

This is a longstanding disagreement in political theory. Debates concerning the representation of individuals, states, local communities, and other constituent bodies were already central to the Federalist and Antifederalist disputes surrounding the founding of the United States. Similar questions continue to arise in discussions of federalism, bicameralism, local autonomy, sovereignty, and democratic legitimacy.

I would like to raise the issue here for broader discussion. I expect that participants may approach it from quite different normative premises and theories of political legitimacy.

My hope is that this can proceed as a Socratic discussion. For that reason, I ask that everyone remain polite and respectful and that, when disagreement reaches genuinely incompatible premises, participants be willing to identify that disagreement clearly rather than treating the other position as foolish or illegitimate.

Participants should try to state one premise at a time, explain their reasons for accepting it, and ask bounded, good-faith questions about the premises offered by others. No premise should be presumed shared merely because it appears obvious; participants should establish agreement where it is needed for an argument to proceed.

Some possible starting questions are:

1. What kinds of entities can meaningfully be represented: individual persons only, or also states, municipalities, nations, communities, institutions, or other organized bodies?
2. What makes representation legitimate: numerical equality, authorization, accountability, consent, affected interests, historical compact, or something else?
3. May different offices or legislative chambers legitimately represent different kinds of constituencies?
4. Does equal citizenship require that every political institution represent individuals on an equal basis, or only that the constitutional system as a whole secure each citizen meaningful and sufficient political standing?
5. When does representation of constituent units protect pluralism and autonomy, and when does it become an unjustified departure from political equality?
6. Under what circumstances, if any, might direct representation of individuals be an unsuitable basis for a particular office, compared with representation through constituent political units or communities?

Because this is a contentious subject, I ask participants to review the Code of Conduct before posting and to ensure that their contributions comply with it. The Code of Conduct can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

Thank you in advance to anyone who offers their thoughts.

@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused. If you continue engaging with others on this forum in this manner, I expect you will receive responses similar to mine, and if you continue not to adhere to the Code of Conduct, you may eventually face moderation action, including a ban.

Regarding reading material, I linked you to the Code of Conduct, and I strongly advise that you read it before continuing to participate here. I would also suggest consulting a standard dictionary entry for “normative,” since the term does not mean “whatever satisfies my preferences.”

Readers can judge this exchange for themselves. You repeatedly cite your own writings as authority, refuse to engage reasonable objections in good faith, and do not answer basic questions put to you. The external citations you provide are themselves significantly more measured than your presentation of them suggests. Harsanyi, for example, explicitly presented his conclusions as conditional on particular ethical postulates and assumptions about rational choice and interpersonal comparison; he did not claim to have mathematically proved the uniquely correct theory of justice. I see no value for me, for you, for this forum, or for the broader reform movement in continuing this exchange. Best of luck to you.

@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified. That is the standard use in political philosophy. You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.

You now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own. A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice. Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments. Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.

Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force. They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total. So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?

Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison. Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.

Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility. A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains. Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.

So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance? You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.

@clay you misunderstand. I am both a participant in this discussion and a moderator of the forum. The moderation note concerns your conduct; the rest of my post concerns your argument.

For reference, the Code of Conduct can be found here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

@clay, you still have not answered the questions I asked. But your response regarding Hawaii is clarifying. You appear to be saying that if a sufficiently large outside population gains enough aggregate utility from controlling policy in Hawaii, then such control is “by definition good,” regardless of Hawaiian self-government, political membership, jurisdiction, or consent.

Is that in fact your position?

If so, then your theory does not merely reject territorial weighting within an existing polity. It rejects any independent normative significance for self-determination, sovereignty, jurisdiction, bounded political membership, or consent whenever aggregate external utility points the other way. That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”

The same logic would appear to permit a policy such as: “Take all extractable resources from region A and transfer them to region B,” provided that the aggregate utility gain claimed for the population of B exceeded the aggregate utility loss imposed on the population of A. Would that policy therefore be “by definition good” under your framework?

More fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals? It seems unlikely to me that we could use, for example, atoms, or some such thing.

Moderator note: Describing another participant’s mental models as “profoundly broken” is personal disparagement. Address the argument rather than the participant’s competence. You have already been warned about this. Further personal disparagement may result in moderation action.

@clay, that is not “ethics 101”; it is a substantive and highly contested form of moral subjectivism. Aristotelian, Kantian, contractualist, natural-law, constructivist, moral-realist, and many consequentialist theories do not define “ought” as “I would subjectively prefer that.”

Likewise, legal rights are created or recognized by law, but moral rights are precisely the standards by which laws may be judged unjust. Saying that “rights are just laws” eliminates the distinction between legality and justice by definition rather than defending that conclusion.

Describing domination as a conflict between two utility functions also does not resolve the normative issue. It tells us that the parties prefer different outcomes; it does not tell us whose preference should govern, whether both preferences deserve equal standing, whether malicious or coercive preferences should count, or what constraints should apply to their aggregation.

You are advancing a preference-subjectivist theory of normativity. That is one possible philosophical position, but it is not the definition of “ought,” and it does not make competing ethical theories disappear by stipulation.

But setting that aside, I asked several questions above that your response did not address.

@clay, to clarify, “normative” does not mean “subjective preference.” It refers to claims about what institutions ought to do or what arrangements are justified. A preference-based account can be one normative theory, but it does not define or exhaust normative theory. Your appeal to unanimous hypothetical preference behind a veil of ignorance is itself a substantive normative argument. Its assumptions and conclusions remain open to examination; they do not make the normative question disappear.

You write that normative theory “cannot float free of what people would actually prefer.” That is true in the limited sense that preferences can and should inform normative judgment. But normative judgment is not wholly determined by existing preferences. People can prefer domination, discrimination, exploitation, or institutions that violate rights. Normative theory asks whether such preferences ought to govern.

Even after preferences are known, one must still decide whose preferences count, under what conditions they count, whether adaptive or malicious preferences count, how rights constrain aggregation, and whether future generations or constituent institutions should have standing.

Moreover, the veil does not mechanically yield your conclusion unless we specify the agents’ information, risk attitudes, conception of political goods, and whether they value only equal individual influence or also protections against persistent territorial domination and the political standing of constituent jurisdictions. Those are themselves normative and institutional questions.

You say that “the preferences here are not in doubt.” That appears central to your argument, but it is precisely what I doubt. Which preferences do you mean, and why should we assume that every person behind the veil would rank the available institutional arrangements in the same way?

The mathematical representation theorem may be valid conditional on its axioms. What does not follow is that those axioms adequately describe actual human preferences, capture all politically relevant values, or uniquely determine institutional design. To support your conclusion, you would need to show why the assumed preference structure, informational conditions, and conception of relevant goods are appropriate here, not merely that the conclusion follows once those assumptions are imposed. Even granting Harsanyi’s result, an additional argument is required to move from equal treatment in a social-welfare representation to the claim that every legitimate political institution must represent individuals directly and only in proportion to population.

The normative question I am raising is whether higher-level offices should remain directly accountable to the statewide population as a whole or instead be constituted partly through the local jurisdictions with which they coordinate. You say that “the remaining question isn’t open; it’s settled.”

Does your position therefore imply that any institution giving constituent political units standing independent of their populations is necessarily normatively indefensible? In particular, do you regard equal state representation in the U.S. Senate as democratically illegitimate in principle? If not, then the question cannot be settled merely by asserting equal per-person weight as the only admissible representational target. If so, that would imply that a central feature of many federated democratic systems—giving constituent units some standing independent of population—is democratically defective in principle.

This returns to my example of an 80–20 coastal–rural division. A persistent territorial minority may be outvoted indefinitely even when its interests are geographically concentrated, structurally distinct, and directly affected by decisions made at the higher level. I do not think your appeal to cardinal voting adequately resolves that problem. Cardinal voting may register the intensity of individual preferences, but it does not by itself guarantee institutional standing or protection for a territorially concentrated minority.

Federated structures address that problem by giving constituent units some independent role in higher-level decision-making. They also create other risks and tradeoffs, including unequal influence, entrenchment, and minority veto. The question is how those competing values should be balanced. It is not obvious, and certainly is not established by Harsanyi’s theorem, that there is one uniquely correct structure of political representation.

Consider two unions containing the same people and the same total population. In one, the local jurisdictions dissolve into a unitary government. In the other, they retain governments, responsibilities, and limited rights of self-rule while delegating specified powers to a common higher authority. Must the higher-level institution have exactly the same representative structure in both cases? If not, then population arithmetic alone does not determine the appropriate unit or structure of representation. The constitutional relationship among the constituent political units also matters.

Taken to its logical extreme, your principle also seems to undermine political boundaries themselves. If equal per-person influence is the uniquely legitimate representational rule, why should only residents of a state or nation participate in decisions affecting that territory? Why should the populations of China and India not collectively exercise more influence over policy in Hawaii than Hawaiians do?

Presumably the answer is that Hawaii belongs to a bounded political community whose members possess some claim to self-government. But that means the relevant constituency cannot be derived from population arithmetic alone. It depends on prior normative judgments about political membership, jurisdiction, sovereignty, self-determination, and the allocation of authority.

So the fundamental question remains: equal influence among whom, over which decisions, and within which political community? Until those questions are answered, equal per-person weighting is not a complete theory of political representation.

@clay, I understand the distinction you are drawing. Unequal weighting within an office explicitly designed to represent individuals statewide would conflict with that office’s stated representational target. Redefining the office as one partly accountable to constituent localities would be a different institutional design.

There are roughly three different kinds of questions we could discuss: normative theory about what political institutions should aim to achieve; institutional design questions about how those goals could be implemented; and legal analysis concerning what arrangements are permissible under existing constitutional and institutional constraints.

My question concerns the first two: what representational structure an election-by-jury system should implement, and how. Saying that the current office should represent the statewide population accepts that this representative function should remain unchanged. That is one idea that I am questioning, not rejecting. You place this topic within your category of “boundary” concerns. I think that category can extend beyond horizontal constituency boundaries to include vertical and hierarchical structures.

Once jurors are sampled to select public officials, the election-by-jury framework can be generalized in different ways. My examples of negotiated juror allocation and guaranteed locality representation were sketches of a more federated, hierarchical conception of the higher-level office, analogous in some respects to the relationship between states and the federal government. They were not attempts to insert arbitrary address multipliers into a structure whose purpose was otherwise accepted. They were part of questioning what purpose that structure should have in the first place. In the United States, legislative districts are generally required to contain roughly equal populations, so geographic districting is generally designed to preserve roughly (though imperfectly) equal individual weighting, even if gerrymandering often distorts the resulting representation.

The relevant disagreement, if any remains, seems not to concern terminology or the mechanics of random jury selection, but whether higher-level offices should remain directly accountable to the statewide population as a whole or instead be constituted partly through the local jurisdictions with which they coordinate.

That is a question of normative theory and institutional design, and it probably belongs in a separate discussion.

@clay, this has become too sprawling to address productively all at once, so I’m going to isolate one point.

You write:

“Your alternative target—‘representation of constituent territorial units’—amounts to a different office, one answering to a federation of localities. That’s the boundary question again, which is upstream politics, and which I’ve never claimed the mechanism settles.”

That appears to concede the point I have been making. Whether a higher-level office represents individuals in one statewide constituency or instead coordinates constituent localities is an upstream political and constitutional choice. Sampling theory can evaluate a jury relative to whichever target is chosen, but it does not choose the target.

You may argue that the statewide individual-population target is preferable. I may argue that a more hierarchical or federated structure deserves consideration. That is a substantive institutional subject of discussion, not evidence that either side is statistically illiterate.

I am not going to respond simultaneously to every additional argument about score voting, Harsanyi, Reynolds v. Sims, subsidiarity, minority protection, and utility aggregation. That produces parallel monologues rather than examination. We should settle this first point before moving to the next one.

Moderator note: @clay, your tone is crossing the line for productive exchange.

Referring to another participant’s argument as “statistical nonsense” and “statistically illiterate nonsense,” and describing that participant as “deeply confused,” is not acceptable here. You may identify errors, criticize reasoning, and reject premises. Do not characterize another participant’s intelligence or competence.

The disagreement concerns the appropriate target and unit of political representation. Treating one side of that contested institutional question as evidence of statistical illiteracy is personal disparagement, not argument. Continue without such characterizations.

Returning to the substance in my capacity as a participant:

Districting is not merely a “hack.” It is a choice to give territorial constituencies standing within a federated political structure. Your argument assumes that the only legitimate target is the distribution of individual preferences across the entire population. That is one possible target, but it is not politically neutral and cannot be established by statistics alone.

Suppose 80 percent of a state’s population lives in a few coastal metropolitan areas and 20 percent lives across a large rural interior. A statewide uniform sample may accurately reproduce the numerical distribution of individual preferences. It does not follow that it provides an adequate mechanism for coordinating the distinct territorial interests, jurisdictions, infrastructure, resource use, and local conditions of the rural interior. A federation may deliberately give constituent territorial units institutional standing rather than permit every issue to be determined solely by aggregate population weight.

You write:

“this is a statistical distortion away from actual accurate representation.”

“Accurate representation” is undefined until you specify what is being represented. If the target is individual preferences in statewide proportion, then uniform sampling is accurate relative to that target. If the target includes representation of constituent territorial units, then stratification is part of the target rather than a distortion, as I have already stated. This seems to be a point of disagreement. If you believe this notion is erroneous, can you please identify the statistical or political premise you reject, and illustrate why?

Politics is not merely an exercise in estimating a population distribution. It is also a system for coordinating interests, jurisdictions, rights, obligations, and policies across differentiated communities. The desired representation must be judged relative to that political purpose. Statistics cannot choose the purpose for us.

You write:

“the district mandate is putting a thumb on the scale rather than letting voters decide.”

No. It selects a different representative unit. I am not arguing that an individual’s vote should count more because that individual’s preferences are rare. I am arguing that a federal structure may reasonably represent both persons and constituent territorial communities in order to coordinate geographically organized interests and prevent persistent statewide majorities concentrated in some regions from overriding sufficient political investment in smaller constituent regions.

Your example involving “Brian’s vote” therefore misses the argument. Territorial representation is not a reward for unusual preferences. It gives institutional standing to communities whose concerns are organized partly by geography: land use, water, transportation, extraction, agriculture, environmental exposure, infrastructure, policing, and local jurisdiction.

Geographic representation can certainly be designed badly. Districts may be unequal, arbitrary, or gerrymandered. But none of that proves that territorial representation is inherently irrational or “obviously suboptimal”; it shows that the structure must be designed carefully. Treating the entire state as a single constituency lies at the opposite end of the same design spectrum and is itself a districting and aggregation choice. For a large, territorially heterogeneous polity, that arrangement is not self-evidently ideal or stable.

You also say:

“there is no ‘supposed to’. there is no ‘ought’.”

That cannot be correct. The decision to define representation as proportional reproduction of individual statewide preferences is itself a normative institutional choice. Invoking what rational citizens would choose behind a veil of ignorance does not eliminate the normative question. A person who did not know whether they would belong to a dense metropolitan majority or a smaller rural region might reasonably prefer a system that protects both individual equality and some degree of territorial standing. They might reject a structure in which a geographically concentrated majority could permanently determine policies for regions with substantially different conditions and needs. The veil of ignorance therefore does not uniquely imply undifferentiated statewide representation.

The proper object of representation cannot be derived from sampling theory alone, because sampling theory evaluates procedures relative to a target that must first be specified. You have assumed a political objective and then labeled alternatives statistically inaccurate relative to that assumed objective. That does not establish that the objective itself is uniquely correct.

If you believe my position contains a contradiction, identify the propositions that generate it. Calling the position statistically illiterate does not demonstrate one.

@clay:

“It certainly wasn’t clear to me.”

You have made that clear. My point is that you have not identified anything incoherent in what I wrote.

I said:

“I do think some of the most sensitive aspects of implementing this kind of proposal would relate to the need for auditability by volunteer citizens or the press, and the possible need for an insulated environment for the jury, and those seem partly in conflict.”

That is a coherent statement. It identifies a possible tension between external scrutiny of the process and insulation of jurors from outside influence. You could reasonably have asked which parts of the process I thought should be auditable, or what form I thought the conflict might take. Instead, you said that you had no idea what I was talking about.

Likewise:

“By auditability, I mean of the process as a whole, by citizens who are not selected as jurors.”

The intended distinction is between scrutiny conducted internally by the jurors and scrutiny conducted externally by members of the public or press. That may require further specification, but it is not incomprehensible.

You now say that the transcript could be published, but that there is nothing for the public to audit because candidates can rebut one another. That does not resolve my concern. Publishing the information presented to the jury would allow the public and press to examine the claims, omissions, procedures, and informational environment that influenced the selection. Whether that scrutiny should create a formal remedy is a separate question from whether the process should be publicly inspectable.

You also say:

“you haven’t shown how we need auditability in terms of what goes on in the courtroom.”

Whether you think it is strictly necessary is not the only relevant question. A public demand for transparency and independent scrutiny would predictably arise around a process that selects public officials. That demand would have to be accommodated, rejected somehow, or limited through explicit institutional rules, which might themselves be unacceptable to the public.

You write:

“we want to prevent external information from entering the courtroom. no one ever said we need to insulate the public from receiving information from the process.”

Then we agree that information should flow outward. The remaining issue is the restriction on information flowing inward. Preventing selected jurors from receiving external political speech, reporting, or commentary would create tension with ordinary public political communication and would be difficult to enforce without intrusive restrictions on jurors’ media exposure and contact with the outside world.

On representation, you write:

“you want uniform sampling, so you get statistical validity.”

No. “Statistical validity” is not meaningful until the target of representation has been specified. Uniform statewide sampling is appropriate if the objective is to approximate the aggregate preferences of individuals in the state. It is not politically neutral to assume that this is the only legitimate object of representation.

My concern is that uniform statewide sampling may fail to give institutional standing to territorially organized interests. Large political systems almost always include geographically stratified representation because locality can carry politically relevant interests that are not reducible to individual population shares.

You then say that guaranteed territorial representation would introduce bias and reduce statistical accuracy. That conclusion follows only if the target has already been defined as the undifferentiated statewide population, which is precisely what I am contesting. If the institution is intended to represent both individuals and constituent localities, territorial stratification is part of the target rather than a distortion of it.

You also write:

“the district mandate is putting a thumb on the scale rather than letting voters decide.”

It is not simply a thumb on the scale. It is a different choice of representative unit. District-based representation guarantees territorial coverage and can reduce the redundancy produced when large numbers of people with correlated local interests are treated only as independent statewide observations. It may also ensure that smaller or geographically concentrated communities are present in the decision-making process.

A federation need not allocate political influence solely by counting individuals within one undifferentiated population. Distinct localities may require institutional standing because their interests, conditions, and vulnerabilities are not captured adequately by raw population weight alone.

That structure can certainly be designed badly. District boundaries can be arbitrary, unequal, or manipulated. But it is not therefore “obviously suboptimal.”

That is the point I have been trying to make. You are treating uniform statewide representation as neutral and alternatives as biased. I am saying that both arrangements embody prior political judgments about what the institution is supposed to represent.

There is also an institutional problem hidden inside the idea of insulation that @Toby-Pereira alluded to. Insulation has to be enforced by some government body or other administrative authority. That body would determine what information jurors may receive, what contact counts as improper, how violations are investigated, and what consequences follow. Those decisions could have a substantial effect on the election itself.

In other words, the institution charged with protecting the jury from outside influence could acquire outsized political influence through control of the jury’s informational environment and selective enforcement of the rules. That authority would itself need strong limits, transparency, independent review, and public auditability.

@clay I’m being pretty clear about what I mean. Please take some time to reciprocate the level of engagement I have given to your manifesto. I’ve explained my concerns in multiple ways; if a particular part remains unclear, you can ask a specific question about it.

By auditability, I mean of the process as a whole, by citizens who are not selected as jurors. The randomness, the information the jury is given, etc. are things that the public deserves the ability to audit for correctness and transparency. I don’t mean the secret ballots of the jurors.

“of course a jury has an insulated environment.”

Yes, that’s my point. An insulated environment is potentially in conflict with demand for external auditability of the process.

In terms of sampling, I am not asking which existing electorate should supply the random sample for an existing office. I understand that, under your proposal, a Senate jury would currently be sampled statewide.

I am questioning the prior institutional choice to treat the state as one undifferentiated constituency for that office, in the sense of sampling uniformly from the entire statewide population without guaranteeing representation to the local political units by which many interests and concerns are naturally organized. An alternative would give districts or localities guaranteed representation in higher-level decision-making, while still using equal random sampling within each locality.

By a hierarchical system, I mean one in which local constituencies select their own representatives or electors, and those delegates coordinate at progressively higher federal levels, rather than every higher-level institution drawing directly from the full aggregate population. In an election-by-jury context, representatives of localities could even negotiate terms under which their constituencies might be represented in higher-level juries—for example, the allocation of juror seats, guaranteed minimum representation, and the territorial units from which jurors are sampled.

These are questions about constituency structure, federal representation, and delegated authority. They also aren’t proposals for unequal sampling among individuals within a fixed constituency. They’re legitimate institutional questions that others evaluating the proposal are also likely to raise.

I also looked more closely at the Georgia examples, and to me they reinforce that these questions are not merely hypothetical. Georgia’s grand-jury appointment systems explicitly specify territorial representation. For example, the Cherokee County Water and Sewerage Authority has six directors appointed by the county grand jury: four representing separate districts, one representing the county at large, and one representing a participating municipality. The elected chair of the county commission serves as the seventh director:

https://ccwsa.com/about__trashed/history-of-ccwsa/

Henry County’s ethics-board law likewise required its five grand-jury appointees to reside in different commission districts, while Crisp County combines four grand-jury-appointed power commissioners with three elected county commissioners.

It would be a substantial research project to look into these implementations in detail, but my narrower point is that actual grand-jury appointment systems have incorporated additional political choices in line with the topics I’m trying to discuss.

@clay the more I think about this, the more I agree. Are there any initiatives for this to be done locally anywhere in the USA?

I do think some of the most sensitive aspects of implementing this kind of proposal would relate to the need for auditability by volunteer citizens or the press, and the possible need for an insulated environment for the jury, and those seem partly in conflict.

I already indicated my thoughts about the sampling rules for the jury in terms of district-based representation for higher level offices. Sometimes I wonder if a completely hierarchical system makes more sense, where districts elect representatives and electors for higher offices, and those electors handle the higher order coordination with other districts, etc.

@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 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.