Election by Citizen Assembly

One of the primary virtues of a democracy is supposed to be that the government is subject to the will of the people. The people who lead the government are selected by the people in accordance with their preferences.

One problem with this idea is that voters may make mistakes. Voters must make their choice on the basis of imperfect information, and thus they may collectively elect a candidate other than the one they would prefer under perfect information.

This seems to be a significant problem with our present system of elections in the United States. Voters are seldom well informed about all of the possible candidates (especially in a primary), and thus base their decision on their knowledge of a small subset of the candidates that they are more familiar with. This surely prevents many highly qualified people from running for a position or winning, when they do. Even so, they are generally very unfamiliar with these candidates, and know only about the way the candidate and the media have chosen to portray them. This fact surely keeps many lesser-known but highly qualified candidates from throwing their hat in the ring.

It would be impossible to adequately inform all of the voters. We could limit votes to those who are informed on the issues, but this would surely have a distorting effect on whose interests are reflected in the vote.

 It would be relatively easy to overcome this problem of ill-informed voters without distorting the will of the people. Consider how it is that we currently run criminal trials. A small number of citizens are chosen to form a jury. They are educated on everything the defense and the prosecution thinks is relevant to their decision, and then they make their decision in light of their evidence.

Suppose we adopted the same system for presidential elections. A small number of citizens are chosen at random to participate as electors. These citizens are educated over a long span of time on the relevant issues facing the nation and on the candidates. They are not informed by the whims of the media, but instead are presented issues by the candidates and their representatives. They could get to know all of the candidates and the issues much more closely. 

If enough citizens were selected, they would be statistically representative of the population at large. Though we could make due with much fewer, I think that 1,000 is a not unreasonable number. The candidates that they would choose are almost sure to be the same as the population at large would, given the same experiences.  The electors could spend a year or more devoted to the election and they could be suitably compensated for their time without making the election itself very expensive. 

Though there may be some downsides (for instance: the majority of the population would no longer be involved in the process, and hence have less reason to stay informed) the impact it would have on opening up elections to a greater range of candidates, and the focus it would put on substantive issues, seem to make it a large step forward.