How Selecting Voters Randomly Can Lead to Better Elections
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Joshua Davis
May 16
- Roughly 2,500 years ago, the citizens of Athens developed a concept of democracy that’s still hailed by the modern world. It was not, however, a democracy in which every citizen had a vote. Aristotle argued that such a practice would lead to an oligarchy, where powerful individuals would unduly influence the masses. Instead the Athenians relied on a simple machine to randomly select citizens for office. It’s an idea whose time has come again. Two separate research initiatives — one from a pioneering cryptographer and a second from a team based at Stanford University — have proposed a return to this purer, Athenian-style democracy. Rather than expect everyone to vote, both proposals argue, we should randomly select an anonymous subset of electors from among registered voters. Their votes would then be extrapolated to the wider population. Think of it as voting via statistically valid sample. With a population of 313 million, the US would need about 100,000 voters to deliver a reliable margin of error. Such proposals can inspire horror. But the fact is, one man, one vote is broken. In the last presidential race, nearly 40 percent of the voting-eligible population didn’t cast a ballot. And that was a good year, with the highest turnout since 1964. If we select fewer people to vote, we can get a better representation of what the country wants. Read More
What you’re saying …
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MoralDrift
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In reply to … ‘Why Big Game Publishers Make Sucky Apps (Hint: It’s You)‘
- The problem is really that there are so many niche mobile original game ideas to be made….and frankly they are mostly simplistic and repetitive. That’s why people want the console experience on their phone or tablet….
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