Re: POLI: Random democracy

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Tue, 18 Feb 1997 13:16:50 -0800 (PST)


> >You could now run for office on a platform that if elected, you
> >will replace yourself with a randomly selected member of your
> >electorate. Since people do not now run on such platforms, I
> >suspect that voters do not in fact trust such a random person to
> >do as well.
>
> This is bad evidence, because legislators cannot replace themselves
> with whomever they like. In the US federal House of Representatives,
> a legislator can resign at will, but the replacement is chosen by
> a special election called by the executive authority of the state
> from which the legislator was elected. Similar schemes are in effect
> in most other polities with representative legislatures.

You could, however, run on the platform that you would randomly
select some citizen and allow him to make all your voting decisions.
That would at least work until you were recalled (which I think
would be likely). I am still not optimistic that those votes would
be any less heinous than those of an elected official himself--in
fact, I'm quite sure they would not be. The masses today believe
in all kinds of nonsense.

When I lived in Seattle, a man changed his name to "Absolutely
Nobody" and ran for Lieutenant Governor. He promised that if he
were elected, he would return his salary and never show up for work.
There's a tweak to democracy I might support--a definite step in
the right direction.

It also served to allow me to say something to our LP candidate
that one rarely gets to say--"Congratulations, Tom, nobody got more
votes than you did."

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>
<http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>