I've long suspected that the best election system would use randomness.

The thing is we need a whole bunch of great people for parlimentary work. But nobody can know all of them well enough to vote for them.

But if every voter was randomly assigned a limited collection of candidates some months ahead of the election, they could make a very well informed vote on those specific candidates.

If there are 100 million voters, 1000 parliament seats and 10,000 candidates then every voter could be assigned let's say 20 candidates and 4 votes to distribute among them.

With a 50% participation rate you'd get about 100,000 inspections of each candidate which should be more than enough.

The best part is that this system completely eliminates personality cults.

The problem with any random system is that it exasperates the existing problem; the unelected assistants become the true power behind the throne.

For a random system to work it would have to randomly appoint people for life or at least long enough terms that they can actually learn how to implement what they want.

good point

Unlimited terms have their own problems.

Poo pooing more representation is an odd stance. Especially because of.... money? This country has never stopped spending money no matter how much austerity is discussed. We do have a bureaucracy problem and that begins with the unions and ends with greater oversight from more accountable representatives.

>Randomly chosen

How long before that gets hijacked? Nothing is random and gaming random chance systems is a specialty of a whole group of industry con-artists.

> Nothing is random

As far as I know jury duty is by random selection, and it's one of the fundamental building blocks of our democracy, and in my opinion it's a well functioning one.

It’s quasi-random - never register to vote and you’ll probably never be called.

And as the joke goes, you’ll be judged by a jury of people who couldn’t get out of jury duty.

That's an interesting idea. I'd keep it to a year to reduce the corruption chances. How would the "Here's $100k if you vote yes on passing this bill along" be detected though.

How can it be detected in our current system?