Did you hear that NPR piece with the Australian (New Zealand?) guy talking about sortition? (To learn more about it, I initially Googled “sautition” because of that adorable accent.)
Anyway, turns out sortition is a political tool that was used in some ancient Greek city states, including Athens, the birthplace of authentic democracy. Sortition involves choosing representatives randomly, rather than via election. It allows for genuine representation, so the random selection of officials can mirror the society represented—e.g., a given political body could, through sortition, include half men, half women; old people and young people; people of various ethnicities, religions, and races. Because of its randomness, a political decision-making body might end up including a poet, a janitor, a retired real estate broker, an arborist, a tattoo artist, a mariner, an exotic dancer, a flautist with the symphony orchestra, a driving instructor, an Episcopalian priest, a dog walker, and a professional surfer. Amen! Given our country’s current feud mentality, it can only be a good thing to get different kinds of people talking and listening to each other.
Here are some advantages of sortition, as I see them, and a couple of concerns:
1. Campaign financing is no longer an issue because you do away with campaigns. Hallelujah!
2. Has anybody else been horrified and nauseated by the role of the electoral college, e.g., in the 2000 election, and the role of Democratic superdelegates, e.g., in the 2016 election? I mean, really, what is the point of voting, if we’re merely children who need the authoritative, Big Daddy oversight of the electoral college and the superdelegates to make sure we get things right? Sortition flips the bird at the electoral college and back room superdelegate collection, and maybe, moves us three giant steps closer to something one might actually, reasonably call democracy. According to The New York Times, superdelegates’ superpowers have been curtailed (though not completely eliminated) since the fiasco of the 2016 election, but still. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/us/politics/superdelegates-democratic-party.html
3. One of the Philosophy Talk hosts said on the radio the other day that Congressional representatives spend half of every workweek raising funds for re-election. Sortition would do away with that, so Congressional representatives could devote their whole workweek to developing creative solutions and bold, meaningful initiatives that make life better for all Americans instead of blowing smoke up the heinies of the rich and famous. (Here’s a link to a transcript of a This American Life episode that outlines the incredible amount of time congresspeople spend fundraising, and the effects on our political system: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/461/transcript)
4. For most of my adult life, I typically have not seen my ideas or values “represented” by my “representatives.” As a person who desires radical protection for the natural world; who favors a revamped understanding of what we mean by and want from education; and who believes work as we’ve conceived it is killing many of us—and thus needs revisiting—I am unrepresented. I suspect there are others like me who feel similarly.
5. Sortition potentially provides some airplay for the most important kind of diversity—diversity of opinion. Did you know that all nine Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale Law School? If you accept the idea that institutions of higher learning have their own cultures, and that attendees of those institutions, at least to some degree, become inculcated in those cultures, that suggests an unfortunately high degree of cultural homogeneity that our Supreme Court brings to bear on issues that affect our whole country, with its broad geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity. (I’m not suggesting that we use sortition to choose Supreme Court justices. Rather, I am making a point about the unfortunate sameness, in one important respect, of people who hold positions of great influence and power in our country.) Let’s really get the party started—with a broad, respectful conversation that includes many, diverse opinions. Maybe sortition could help nudge us in that direction.
6. Candidates would not enter into office already owned by oil companies, banks, Big Pharma, etc. That doesn’t mean that, once selected, they wouldn’t be vulnerable to “offers” from these powerful players. We would really need to put our thinking caps on about how to keep those interests out of sortition-based politics.
7. We might possibly be able to view our political representatives as actual public servants and not two-faced, self-serving lizards. (My apologies to lizards.)
8. This would allow a minor exploration into sharing the wealth. Some representative positions will be better paid than the jobs of some of the citizens who might be selected through sortition to serve. By making these better-paying jobs more broadly available, we spread around the sunshine a little bit.
9. We wouldn’t need to jump into the deep end with this, and go 100% sortition all the time. As the Australian guy—I’ve got to look up his name—points out, this system can be eased into, with, say, half of a political body being chosen by sortition and half continuing as elected officials. That way, we get our feet wet, we identify weaknesses and strengths of the system, and we make appropriate tweaks and changes.
10. In order to get the sortition ball rolling, for example in the House of “Representatives,” Congress itself would likely have to OK the experiment. Seems unlikely, on account of entrenched power and not wanting to give it up and all. So it would probably make sense to advocate for the idea more locally, e.g., at the city council level, build momentum (or not), and then consider, if appropriate, larger, more broadly “representative” bodies as candidates for sortition.
11. I do think sortition would need to be given a generous trial period. Urban revitalizer and economic diversity advocate Majora Carter worked with local citizens in the Bronx to establish a waterside park for the community. Initially, she found that people, when asked what they wanted, had nothing to say; this population had never before had the opportunity to voice preferences and be heard. Carter was patient, stuck with the process, and found that, eventually, people were able to articulate their hopes and desires for the park. Take-away: Giving people a voice, particularly people who haven’t had much of a voice, requires a commitment to giving the experiment time to actually work.
12. How could it not be worth it to try something different? How could sortition possibly be worse than the cynical stank we have now, where, in the election booth, we so often need to choose between a crummy candidate and a lousey candidate? I hate multiple choice questions, particularly when all the answers reek.
The Australian guy’s name is Brett Hennig. He has started an organization called The Sortition Foundation. You can visit at:
https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/
Here’s a link to his nine-minute TED Talk: