points by franga2000 4 days ago | 0 comments
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.
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.