A White Tower stooge has published an article in the New York Times suggesting that America might be better off if it bailed on the popular vote. Given the recent trajectory, who could blame anyone for thinking that?
On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows. Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.
Officials? Integrity? I think you misspelled “officials have been working to undermine the safeguarding of elections.” It’s okay. If the elections are rigged, and we can’t unrig them, perhaps there is a better way.
The premise for change is sensible. The worst sort of people are drawn to politics. They are more often persuasive, manipulative, and likely to lie. The very nature of the occupation attracts characters who will power. All true. To escape this, Dr. Adam Grant, a contributing opinion writer who is an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, suggests a lottery.
Random schmoes are picked from a “hat” and appointed to the duty for some number of years until “someone” randomly picks new ones.
When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well. And in one of the Haslam experiments, when a leader was picked at random, members were more likely to stand by the group’s decisions.
He points to Ancient Athens, where,
“…people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.”
It sounds appealing, yes? We’d save gazillions of dollars on primaries and elections and that pesky federalism—no more Super PACS or election Dark Money. The current system has been corrupted, and there are few constraints on the abuse by its manipulators. A problem some suggest could be resolved with an Article V convention, but why would anyone ignoring the current piece of paper suddenly take notice of it if you changed or added a few words?
Is a lottery the answer?
I think Dr. Grant was picked to float a trial balloon at the Paper of Record to open the door for ending elections, nothing more, nothing less, because it is easier and less messy than replacing the electorate. Convince them that their participation damages [insert thing here] and make excuses for why anything else is better.
No one says that, but he does point out how much money and bother would be averted, and the siren call is alluring (for some, I’m sure). No more campaign calls or mailboxes filled with glossy campaign literature. But the Swamp would run everything since a genuine and honest lottery would produce winners who wouldn’t know how anything works or be in office long enough to learn. In other words, ending the corruption and malfeasance only works if you first dismantle the administrative state by subjecting their jobs to a lottery—at least the top tiers of the folks running those agencies. Kick them out and take their names out of the hat.
We wouldn’t want lottery-elected leaders appointing those people, would we? Assuming the lottery isn’t fixed, why would we think anything less?
Not that this is what they are after, quite the opposite. They want figureheads managed by pencil pushers who are nearly all progressive stooges themselves.
Will my social credit score exclude me?
There are many questions, but Dr. Grant seems determined to convince us this would be better, and he points to Canada and the Netherlands as examples.
Other countries have begun to see the promise of sortition. Two decades ago, Canadian provinces and the Dutch government started using sortition to create citizens’ assemblies that generated ideas for improving democracy. In the past few years, the French, British and German governments have run lotteries to select citizens to work on climate change policies. Ireland tried a hybrid model, gathering 33 politicians and 66 randomly chosen citizens for its 2012 constitutional convention. In Bolivia, the nonprofit Democracy in Practice works with schools to replace student council elections with lotteries. Instead of elevating the usual suspects, it welcomes a wider range of students to lead and solve real problems in their schools and their communities.
None of these places is better or better off than America. Most of them are worse, and a few are tipping toward totalitarianism. This suggests that the oft-quoted maxim about political systems is still valid. The American Republic is the worst system in the world except for all the others – and a lottery is not the answer. Or is it?
Perhaps we need a lottery of regular folks to work for four-year stretches as managing editors, producers, or directors for news, media, and big tech companies. Or, better yet, a lottery for the positions of those who run and control state and local elections. Moderators, poll workers.
I bet that would shake things up a bit. It might even “fix” the Democracy™.
