Re:Elections are bad for democracy
by dragonwriter on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @01:19PM
(#12003088)
> It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced.
Similar mechanisms to grand or petit juries? Because the latter is what most people are familiar with, but most sortition proposals would seem to be structurally more like grand juries [0]: which are, for structural reasons (including the time commitments involved) far less representative of the jury pool they are notionally drawn from than petit juries are.
And the mechanisms which keep them fair and balanced are different (though similar in one way: for both kinds of juries, one of the important methods is that most of the things they do aren't decisive on their own -- except criminal acquittals -- and are inputs to final rulings by judges; for grand juries, this is particularly true, since they act at the very beginning of the process; clearly, this common aspect of the control on juries is not present in most proposals for lawmaking-by-sortition.)
[0] For California (and some other US) jurisdictions, take this as "criminal grand juries", as civil grand juries may not even be notionally representative.
Similar mechanisms to grand or petit juries? Because the latter is what most people are familiar with, but most sortition proposals would seem to be structurally more like grand juries [0]: which are, for structural reasons (including the time commitments involved) far less representative of the jury pool they are notionally drawn from than petit juries are.
And the mechanisms which keep them fair and balanced are different (though similar in one way: for both kinds of juries, one of the important methods is that most of the things they do aren't decisive on their own -- except criminal acquittals -- and are inputs to final rulings by judges; for grand juries, this is particularly true, since they act at the very beginning of the process; clearly, this common aspect of the control on juries is not present in most proposals for lawmaking-by-sortition.)
[0] For California (and some other US) jurisdictions, take this as "criminal grand juries", as civil grand juries may not even be notionally representative.