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points by tatersolid 5 days ago | 0 comments
Voting officials should be selected by sortition at all levels, similarly to jury pools. Allowing self-selection can allow for collusion or a biased pool of election workers and judges, especially in cities/towns with an established single-party patronage bureaucracy.
[–] franga2000 4 days ago
For election officials, you don't want a representative sample, you want a maximally diverse sample. If a certain party has e.g. 40% support and you randomly draw 6 election workers per polling place, the chance of giving them 50% or more on any polling place is quite high. Include some adjacent parties and you'll get some very one-sided groups.

Of course, you can't do a lottery and then demand the chosen self-identify which party they support, nor can you trust them to be honest. The result is that you can only have people who volunteer.

I think the system we have in Slovenia is quite close to optimal: every party who got at least X % in the last election gets to submit applicants and each polling place gets 6 people, who have to have been referred by different parties, with priority based on the rank of the party in the last election.

[–] tatersolid 4 days ago
> nor can you trust them to be honest

We trust juries with locking people up for life if necessary and settling billion-dollar lawsuits. That’s the beauty of sortition. Most randomly selected people are honest instead of biased party functionaries.

Even if you got 3/4 registered Republicans at one polling location via sortition, the chances of those being people willing to cheat the election is very small as they are random citizens.

Similar to jury selection you would probably keep identity and assigned location secret by law until Election Day to prevent tampering.

[–] gucci-on-fleek 4 days ago
> Voting officials should be selected by sortition at all levels

It's actually a pretty hard job, so I don't think that that's very realistic. I've worked as voting officer a few times in Canada, and it's a ~15 hour shift with maybe an hour of breaks total (or if you're unlucky, zero breaks), you need to be quite organized since there's so much paper, and it's quite stressful due to the volume of voters (some of whom tend to be quite angry).

The actual procedures are fairly simple, but you need to do them ~300 times in a day, without making any mistakes, while being rushed by the long lines. Anybody on HN could probably handle this (it's only a single 3-hour training course), but it's probably beyond what a substantial portion of the population is capable of, so sortition probably wouldn't lead to great results.

> Allowing self-selection can allow for collusion or a biased pool of election workers and judges, especially in cities/towns with an established single-party patronage bureaucracy.

In Canada, any candidate can send up to 2 people to each ballot booth to observe the procedures and ensure that all the rules are correctly followed, and most serious contenders tend to send at least 1 person to each polling place. So this should help to prevent collusion in most cases.