Democracy Without Politicians with Terry Bouricius

0:00Imagine, I often use this example. What if we had a jury process in courts where there's a case and the jurors were elected and they raised campaign money and they could meet in private and seek it with people from the prosecution and listen to their point of view and maybe take a donation for their next campaign and that was the way courts were decisions were made. We would say, that's insane, that's horrible, it's no way justice will be served. You just heard Terry Boruchis describe a courtroom that doesn't exist. One where the jurors are elected, where they raise campaign money and can meet in private with the prosecution before they decide on a case. We would call that kind of insane and yet it's a pretty apt description of how we make our laws. I'm Dave Troy and this is episode 5, season 4 of Dave Troy Presents. This season I've been asking what it would take to not just defend our democracy but to imagine some slightly different futures. A few episodes back we looked at the concept of national service.

1:00Today we're asking a different question. Our elections themselves, the candidates that they tend to attract and the process itself, part of what ails us. And are there other ways of conducting the business of democracy that might sometimes in some cases be more useful? My guest is Terry Boruchis. He spent 20 years in elected office in Vermont City Council and then the statehouse followed by a decade at Fairvogue working on ranked choice voting. And then after realizing some of the limitations of elections, he quit trying to improve them and started working on something else. Since 2005 he's been the leading American theorist of sortition government by lot. He calls himself a recovering politician. We'll talk about some of the problems with elections, the history behind sortition and the use cases where it makes the most sense. And importantly, just because elections are kind of broken, that doesn't mean you shouldn't vote. Terry is also an elections expert and we discuss the upcoming midterms. Long story short, the elections themselves are plenty secure,

2:00but what may happen afterwards is cause for some concern. So let's dive right into the conversation with Terry Boruchis. So thanks, Terry, for joining me today. Really looking forward to this conversation. So am I. So it's good. So give us a little bit of background on who you are. You gave a talk back in June at Ted Democracy in Philadelphia about some ideas that we'll cover today. But before we get into those ideas, how did you sort of get here? What is your background? Yeah, I have a different path and most of the people who are working in my field, publishing and so on are academics and so on. And I'm not an academic. I was, I refer to myself as a recovering politician. I spent 20 years as an elected lawmaker. First ten in Burlington City Council, I was elected actually along with Bernie Sanders.

3:01When he got elected government, I was elected as well. And after 10 years there, I ran for the legislature, the state legislature, and I got elected and I served another 10 years as a state legislator. And after I left, I got a level of feeling like this wasn't a good functioning democracy. It seemed like the body was full of, you know, a fair number of ego-tests. I'll put myself in that category. People who are kind of overly self-confident and full of themselves are not, they weren't really like the general population in a lot of respects, you know, income and so forth. Well, it takes us a certain kind of person to stand up for a popularity contest. Yeah, you know, it's like somebody, I don't know who phrased this, is democracy is about bringing forth the shy people. Right. And, and, you know, it's true that if you look at Congress, a majority of them are millionaires. They're by and large narcissistic, not necessarily mental illness, you know, narcissism,

4:07but they're, but they tend to be rather full of themselves. And also, when you think you know everything and you have all the answers, it's really hard to absorb new information that contradicts your previous assumptions and beliefs. And so I just felt like the legislature I was serving in wasn't doing a particularly good job. So I went to work for an organization called Fairvote, the Center for Voting and Democracy, which is working on election reform around the country and even internationally. We're pushing for things like Rank Choice Voting, Proportional Representation, those kind of forms. Yeah, so, you know, on this journey, I mean, you hear people talk about, you know, the American democracy and some people will get mad and say, oh, it's not a democracy. It's a constitution republic and, you know, we vote for reparations. Oh, yeah, it's a whole Republican Democrat thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I listen to C-SPAN all the time and that's the favorite retort on all that. And, you know, so I think what you're, what you have kind of found is something that's sort of in between. This, this model.

5:08So let's get into the media. I'll say it's a layer higher. It's not between the two. It's a completely different approach. But it has the potential to appeal to people of all political stripes in terms of where they are ideologically. Yeah. So kind of as an alternative to this kind of, you know, class of narcissists, relatively wealthy, somewhat out of touch politicians who maybe mean well, but maybe can't actually perform well because of the realities of their situation. You've identified this concept sortition, which of course is very old. But for, you know, folks that aren't familiar with the term sortition, give us an idea of what this is. Well, yeah, it is ancient. In fact, in ancient Athens and Greek democracies, the key characteristic that defined them as a democracy was not the mass assembly that everybody learns about in school. It was the fact that they used lottery selection to fill almost all their government bodies. The Bule, the council of 500, set the agenda in the reformed democracy of Athens.

6:11It was the nomathetite. This was a jury-like body, 500 or a thousand people randomly selected. And they were the only body allowed to adopt new laws, not the assembly. It was this jury-like process. And, you know, the courts were jury-like processes. All the magistrates were in panels of 10 randomly selected. And when people said, oh, no, but Athens was all about the mass assembly. That's because that's what we learned. But, you know, Sparta had a large assembly, too. But it was not a democracy because the elite controlled the agenda. They decide what the people would get to vote on. In Athens, it was a democracy because a randomly selected body controlled the agenda of the assembly. So it is very ancient. And it sort of went away. We still have a version of it or a reinvention of it in our jury model. This is something most people will be familiar with, is, you know, you show up in a jury. And somehow this sort of body of random people from your community is able to think and reach conclusions

7:14that everybody mostly seems to think are pretty fair. We trust juries to make life and death decisions. And in fact, it's enshrined in our constitution. I think three different amendments in the Bill of Rights that talk about the importance of a jury process. And, you know, it's a very critical piece. Now, the old jury process back hundreds of years, they didn't use random selection. The sheriff would pick people at Central Test Jo. So it's not, we didn't inherit it from Athens. It was a reinvention the way we have it now. But the interesting thing was, after I left the legislature office, no longer politician, I was working on election form, I figured we just needed to fix this, this election system. It's just putting the wrong people in the office. I, in that role, I gave testimony to the British Columbia citizens assembly. This was a body that the legislature, the parliament and British Columbia set up to make a plan for reforming their voting system.

8:16And so I as an election voting reform expert gave testimony. But this was unlike any elected legislature. It was one man, one woman, from each legislative district selected by random lottery. And I, and these, these were just ordinary everyday people. They were, you know, barkeepers, teachers, engineers, all kinds of professions. And I was stunned. They spent months on weekends coming together, listening to expert testimony, deliberating, having public hearings. And after many months of work, they came up with a proposal and a light bulb went off over my head. I said, well, he's like, this is what democracy looks like. Every day people learning the facts, not just answering an opinion poll, but randomly cited they had no, no hidden agendas, they had no campaign donors to satisfy. They didn't feel like they had to smear the opposition within the body.

9:19They came together and they learned to like each other. There was no incentive to, you know, demonize any of their fellow members. And I, and I said, what this? And that was my transition moment from working on election reform to working on social. Right. But I mean, of course, some might say, well, that's, you know, British Columbia. You know, these are Canadians who are talking about our Americans capable of this sort of thing. Well, it's interesting. In the United States, I would say, gosh, less than a tenth of a percent of Americans have ever heard of this concept. And they've heard of juries. So they sort of have an inkling of the idea, but the idea that a jury-like process, a large jury, could deal with making laws or policy decisions is when I first mentioned to people, they usually laugh. Right. But then when I say, when I explain a little bit about the dynamics of experts coming in and having a balance of pro and con arguments and learning the facts, and I use the analogy of the jury, that most people go, yeah. And then the kicker is that it couldn't be worse than the politicians we have now.

10:22And everybody says, yeah. Because quite frankly, there is the, you look at all the kinds of professions and they say, how, how honorable or how much do you respect these organizations? You have the military or scientists or teachers or entrepreneurs at the very bottom of politicians. Right. Now, I think that some people might intuitively say, well, doesn't this sort of a process potentially devalue my vote? I'm voting for people that I want to carry the agenda that I have. How does this fit into it? And I guess you've kind of identified that there are certain types of activities and roles and niches that this can be maybe uniquely effective, maybe getting into or that. Well, I would love to, I used to call it my 200 year project. I would love to get to the point where we didn't have politicians and it was everyday people in a jury like process being the democracy.

11:23But that's going to take a while to get there. So there are certain things that could happen right away. Like, oh, let's say in a municipality, the city council might say, you know what? We don't really like being diverted by dealing with zoning amendments, changing the zoning laws. We're going to set up a jury process and all future zoning changes are going to be done by everyday people in a jury that listen to pro and con arguments on the changes and they'll vote and will just be done with it. So there's a lot of areas where you could do it where the politicians would say, okay, you can do that. But my dream is, I call it my peeling strategy, taking away one policy domain at a time from elected legislatures or bureaucrats and transferring that authority, real authority to jury like process and the analogy I use is like the monarchies of Europe. I mean, they still exist. But, you know, there's a ceremonial. I look forward to the day when Congress is ceremonially, you know, they're passing resolutions, changing the name of a post office to honor some local celebrity.

12:24But the important decisions about taxes, about about all kinds of things, climate change, whatever are being done by large, well informed juries of everyday people. Right. And I guess, you know, in terms of this peeling strategy, it seems like sort of starting that at the local level, maybe at the county state level is a good starting point. Because the issues are different. There's all kinds of strategies that are out there. Some people think that the first thing to do quite frankly, and there are people working on these ideas, is there are some states where you can amend the constitution by petitioning to put an item on. And if it's passed, it's passed and you bypass the legislature. Because the reasoning is that the politicians aren't going to want to take significant power away from themselves. But there are a lot of states where you can just do it without the politician of permission. You can just do it. And so there's people who propose that, well, what about a constitutional amendment that says every X years, maybe every five years or 10 years, there will be a constitutional convention of ordinary people from our state.

13:30They'll look at the constitution and see if there are any changes that are needed now for our state constitution. The same concept is actually being talked about on the federal level, believe it or not, an Article V constitutional convention. There's a lot of people on the right who have been looking for a constitutional amendment to like I have a balanced budget or term limits. There's some people on the left who want to have constitutional amendments to limit the influence of money in elections. There's all kinds of dynamics. But the problem is, most people are worried about that because they're afraid. Any constitutional convention like that will be very partisan and political. We don't want that. But if you did it by jury, randomly selected citizens coming together, becoming well informed, listening to a lot of testimony. People tend to, in fact, people are left and right. That's one of the funny things about this. I've given talks about sortition, this lottery selection process, to, for example, right, weighing libertarian organization. And when I start talking about how bad politicians are, they're all nodding their head.

14:30And we all, whether we're left or right or middle or wherever we are, we tend to think that if we could get a room full of ordinary people and just explain things to them, the way we understand them, give them all the fact that we have absorbed to come to our conclusions, they'd agree with me, whether we're, you know, trumpers on the right or libertarians or socialists or middle-of-the-road people, no matter what we tend to think, we've come to this conclusion rationally. Therefore, everybody else would, if we could just explain it to them. And therefore, I think sortition, at least initially, has the potential to appeal to people across the political spectrum who are fed up with politics as usual. Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, one of the things that people intuitively know are kind of broken, whether a politics is the team sports aspect, where, you know, everybody is... Tribalism. It's tribalism and also people are concentrating wealth within these teams, you know, so there's money that is affecting people. And, you know, one of the points that you make is that it's very difficult to lobby a jury, you know, like...

15:34Yeah, I mean, you would obviously have to have, you know, anti-corruption procedures like juries do. It would be criminal. You know, imagine, I often use this example. What if we had a jury process in courts where there's a case and the jurors were elected, and they raised campaign money, and they could meet in private in secret with people from the prosecution, and he listened to their point of view, and maybe take a donation for their next campaign. And that was the way courts were decisions were made. We would say, that's insane. That's very... That's horrible. It's no way justice will be served. So why do we allow that for the making of the laws? If we realize it's insane to have a court process like it's equally insane or more insane to allow our laws to be made that way with secret deals, and people say, well, the vote we can throw the bombs out, you know, we have accountability and a jury, there's no accountability. The dynamic there is people...

16:35There is no accountability through elections. There's a handful of cases where somebody gets enough bad press that they get thrown out. But by and large, voters have no idea what they're representing. Because it's not their role-called votes, even that matter. It's the secret deals they make behind closed doors with other people, with the other side, with other legislators, with lobbyists, with campaign donors, that the voters will never know about. And so it's essentially impossible to use elections to hold politicians to account as a whole. Individual cases arise. But I mean, look at the power of in-convenancy. I mean, most in-convenancy get re-elected. Most people... Over 90% of the people... Yeah, and they tried to... ...dead their last name. People do it by name. People are more like legislators are more likely to die in office than be voted out of office in a general election. Right. Now, there's, I think, the typical sort of schools of thought on this topic of sort of

17:35drawing wisdom from groups of people is that either you sort of have the sort of play-to-view, which is that it's the ship of fools and you couldn't possibly rely on just random people. You need a pilot. You need a pilot, an expert that is going to guide things, or at the very least, a better selection of people than just randos. But then you have kind of the wisdom of crowds school of thought. And I guess what I'm wondering is, to the extent that we're starting to get more data and more experience in running these kinds of assemblies, what kind of evidence is coming in in terms of suggesting who's correct? Is play-toe correct? Is the, you know, the rhythm of crowdside correct? Going back to... Well, first of all, I should make for people who in the United States who aren't aware of this, there have been more than 1,000 citizens assemblies, randomly selected bodies around the world in throughout Europe, in South America, Japan, Australia, all kinds of places. People have run these things and people have been amazed at how competent, how effective their work is.

18:42Some places they've even institutionalized it in places in Belgium and in France. In Paris, they have a permanent citizens assembly that sets an agenda and then can say we need to have some ordinance on this issue and they would call a jury to deliberate on that one issue. Yeah, I think Macron has been pretty into this concept, if I'm correct. Yeah, there was the... People may cast their mind back to the yellow vests protests when Macron tried to put through a carbon tax, basically raised fuel and rural people said, no, this is unfair. We have to drive, to get to work, etc., etc. Big protests. So his fallback was, okay, we'll have a citizens assembly and it was a citizens convention on climate, randomly selected body that came over 100, I think 140, something recommendations on climate, and nowhere in their recommendations was a tax on fuel, actually. But the problem is, of course, the politicians didn't enact all of that. They sort of cherry picked some things. But the point is outside the United States, people who read the news, who follow politics,

19:45they know all about sortition because it's a big thing around the world, just not in the US. In the US there have been some, some municipal. In fact, there's one that's... While we're recording this, there's one that's ongoing for the entire state of Connecticut right now on property tax. Interesting. So there is that experience. But about the, whether the Plato idea, you need an expert pilot to steer the ship of state. But the thing is, you need a pilot to know how to trim the sales and operate the rudder and so on. But you need the passengers to decide where you're going. Right, what the supposed to be. So the people need to be in control, not the details. Yes, you will hire experts. But it's worth also noting that people like Aristotle wrote that to select magistrates and officials by lottery is democratic, to elect them is oligarchic. And most people don't realize that for over 2,000 years it was understood by political theorists

20:50all around Europe and so on that elections were the natural tool for an aristocracy because elections favor people with power, money, celebrity. I have to take a little sip of my tea. Yeah, no worries. No worries. Well, I think also, you know, the American ideal of, you know, sort of the gentleman farmer that goes and serves a term or maybe two in the legislature, you know, just because they are a leader and they've been called in to do this because of their leadership. That, you know, is not the way it played out, you know, we have instead this career politician thing. And I think that original model of the gentleman farmer is much closer to the sortition approach in spirit than what we're doing now. Yeah, in fact, the, when elections are really small, really local where most of the voters know the candidates personally, they can work. But once you get to the point where voters don't have any firsthand information, elections become about manipulation, who has the most information that they've made those ads, name recognition, etc, etc.

21:56But it was understood even back at the founding of the United States, I mean, the thing you mentioned at the beginning is, is it a republic or it's a democracy. It's worth noting that at that time, the founders, people like Madison and so on, they were not supporters of democracy. They did not want to create a democracy. They wrote, you know, very angry words about democracy that it would, it would be dangerous to property rights, etc., etc. But they also recognized that what they wanted was to have only wealthy property owners in control. They didn't want ordinary people. They didn't want laborers. They didn't want people, of course, women or slaves, etc. But they didn't want ordinary people now in Athens, laborers with no property were part of the democracy. But in the United States, they didn't want that. They considered democracy dangerous. But they also realized that elections were problematic.

22:58In fact, Madison, I have a quote here, which I think it's worth reading, when he was complaining about the articles of Confederation and why we need to get rid of them and do something else, he talked about the problem with elections. And he said, representative appointments, elections are sought from three motives. Ambition, two personal interest, three public good. Unhappily, the first, the two first are proved by experience to be most prevalent. And he has a whole paragraph talking about how people who get elected for personal gain, for financial gain, or for status, etc. They also have the skills to deceive the public and get reelected over and over again. So he saw exactly the danger. And he hoped that people who have studied Madison, he hoped that having a large nation, that the factions wouldn't coalesce that people in that state wouldn't meet with the people in this other state and form a united effort.

24:03And so that the factions would sort of butt heads with each other so that no horrible corruption would happen. But that immediately fell apart as soon as political parties were in front of you. And Madison was one of the inventors of it. Yeah, I think what is it? Federalist number 10? It makes sense when you're a politician. Federalist number 10, I think, is the one that talks about the dangers of factions and that kind of stuff. Right. So I mean, I think what's interesting about the United States is that it has been this long-running experiment in keeping these kinds of forces in balance, at least as best as we do. And that's the best as we can with the situation that we have at the moment, which has been shifting. But never perfect. We sort of set out the mission statement or the vision statement, maybe in the declaration of independence. And then we've been trying to live up to that ever since and we're never quite getting there. So I mean, I like to make clear that while I'm talking about trying to get rid of politicians and while elections are so problematic. In the short term, if the only choice is elections, which are basically a form of oligarchy of an elite or an authoritarian dictator, I'll go with the elections.

25:07Yes. Okay. So I'm not telling people to not vote. I don't even be clear about that. But the goal, I want to get beyond elections so that we have a real democracy because elections inherently favor people who have money, have connections, have celebrity. And every, you know, just look at, like I said, majority members of Congress are millionaires. And there's like a handful of people who have an actual working class background other than maybe while they were in college, they worked a blue college job. But basically Congress is filled with people who have no firsthand real firsthand knowledge about the needs of everyday people. And I mean, here's one story that I like to tell was when I was in the legislature in Vermont. I was on a committee, we were dealing with a bill about landlord tenant rights and obligations evictions and so on. And I noticed that my fellow committee members weren't paying a lot of attention to some of the witnesses. And they thought they already knew what to do.

26:08And so during a break, I said, how many of us are renters? None of us. So that's interesting. And so I made a personal mission to go around and ask as many members of the House of Representatives, there are 150 of us. How many were renters and how many were homeowners and how many were landlords? I didn't get to everybody, but I got to the bulk of the legislature. I only found one renter in the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, about a third of Vermonters rented. And I said, wait, so renters are incredibly underrepresented and questionable assumptions that people who are landlords or homeowners might make. And the stories that they trade about, a horrible renter who wrecked the apartment, all those stories were being told. But none of them heard stories about a landlord who threatened a tenant. You're going to have sex with me or I'm going to evict you. That kind of thing happens. But they never hear those stories because there's no renters to tell them. Yeah, and that community. So yeah, and that's a great example of something where you have something where a kind of technical expertise, or at least a contextual expertise is needed.

27:14And if you don't have people within the assembly that are familiar with these things, it's a problem. I mean, I think you see some of this too. There's that whole doctrine about delegation of Congress delegating to executive agencies, that kind of thing. And the fact is that that's actually probably pretty good because you really do want people in these executive agencies who are career professionals who know something about, say, airplanes to be running the FAA. I do not want my congressperson to have to study the ins and outs of air traffic and the history of airplanes and how they work and everything else. Like, you know, so I mean, I think that there's a natural sense that like, yeah, you know, there are real limits to what an elected legislative body can know. Or a sortition body. The fact is you talked about the wisdom of crowds and so on. There's two different dynamics. And I have this whole design called multi-body sortition. I don't think it would work to simply replace the members of the House of Representatives with red and mistletted people in that same kind of body.

28:18They would quickly develop their own internal hierarchy and they would have- The calcify quickly. It wouldn't work. You need to have a completely new architecture. But there's the wisdom of crowds. The idea is that if people, the example it is used like people guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, if you average the number of guesses of everybody, throughout maybe a few of the highest and lowest and then average, it tends to be right on. So the idea that if you have an issue and you just want to say, what is the values? What is the direction you as a society want to go? A random group of people is an excellent way of determining that. It's the scientific method, a stratified sample of people or whatever. A sample of 500 will accurately reflect what the entire population would decide if somehow they could all spend the time to become well informed like that jury to learn all the facts and then make a decision.

29:22A jury does that just as well at a tiny fraction of the cost. But there's also another thing, that's collective, excuse me, that's the wisdom of the crowds. There's also this dynamic of, it's called collective intelligence, where a diverse group of people, they don't necessarily even have to be represented in the population, but just very diverse, are better problem-solvers than a relatively homogeneous group. Politicians, even if they disagree on ideology, they're very homogeneous. They're very much like each other. One example I say I use is, like if you had a group trying to devise a new transportation policy for your city, you could get all the transportation experts together and they would decide this is how we should do it. Take a random group, they're going to have experiences that the experts have never considered, they've never done that. Maybe you randomly end up with somebody with Down syndrome on your jury. Because you shouldn't allow that, yes you should, because quite frankly, the other members of the jury say, well what about Bill here?

30:27If we did it that way, he wouldn't be able to figure out what bus to get out. We need a clearer system for people like Bill. That diversity increases the competence of the group as a whole. We don't care about the competence of each individual member of a jury. We care about the competence of the group as a whole and diversity trumps expertness on terms of values of what we want to go. You need the experts to then work out the details of how you set it up and run it and so on. But you don't need experts in Turkey, you don't want experts to deciding what the policy should be. Let me get a clarify that a little bit further. In the context of a jury, we'll see the presentations by an expert witness, something like that that's been brought in to provide a bit more technical expertise on a certain topic. You'll have the plaintiff present one view and the defense will present another and the jury looks it over and whatever.

31:27That's what my question is in the context of these sort of sort of sort of assemblies. Do some of them sometimes call in experts to expert topics? Is that part of the process? Well, there's two broad categories of sort of sort of bodies. There can be ones where all they're doing, they're not devising a policy. There's just some other group has prepared a draft law and then this group listens to the pro and con arguments for this new bill. And that's exactly how the Nolmuthetai worked in ancient Athens. They would listen to five people and favor the proposed law and five people against and then they would vote. Without deliberating amongst it, it was just the deliberation within your own head individually. That's one concept and that's an important one. But the other one is the cognitive diversity where they're crafting proposals. You might have anybody in society working teams to draft proposals and submit a whole bunch of draft new bills on whatever the topic is.

32:31Let's say taxation. And then you might have a randomly selected body. It's very diverse. Look at all these proposals, put piece from this one and piece from this one, combine them, send it back to them. They're all there and they had all kinds of expert testimony, pros and cons, people who disagree with each other violently, experts who disagree. You don't want to have it being manipulated by people who are picking the experts. Right. Now, I think some people might listen to what we're talking about and notice that it kind of resembles in one way a focus group. Like that's a time on technique for sort of extracting wisdom from random people. What is the difference between what you're talking about and what people might think of as focus groups? Well, a key thing, a focus group usually has one moderator who's steering things and getting the information. That's a dangerous model because any one person, that person might be bribed to make sure that they steer the jury towards this conclusion.

33:32So you need, quite frankly, I think you need a randomly selected body that all their job is to work on the rules and the oversight to make sure that the facilitators and the experts are balanced. That if some facilitators found to be putting their thumb on the scale and pushing it a certain way, they'd be fired by this randomly selected oversight body. You do not want a focus group model of a leader. In theory, that person is open-minded because they want to get for their client the best information. But if you are actually making laws, the risk is, person would be bribed. Right. And so I say within a large jury of citizens assembly, let's say 250 people, you would still have to have all kinds of protections against corruption. One of the scenarios I proposed is that when they are randomly selected and they are signed to a jury and they say you get paid for your time, you get child care, all these kinds of benefits.

34:35And by the way, you might be approached by somebody for a bribe, like maybe a job of squishy job after you get off this jury, if you vote the right way, etc. etc. But just know that we're going to have plants, fake bribers approaching you. If you report them, you're going to get a nice bonus. Bonus, and if you don't report them, you're probably going to go to jail. There are things you need to do to protect the jury process from corruption. Because, quite frankly, the citizens assembly, as we've had, and I said it, there's been over a thousand of them, most of them have been advisory. They've been drafting ideas that they then give to the politicians. And in that scenario, there's not enough incentive for bribers and corruptors to go and bribe them because they already know how to bribe with campaign donations, the politicians. So they don't bother trying to bribe the citizens assembly. But if the citizens assembly was making real important decisions and not passing it on politicians, they would suddenly become prime subjects for potential corruption.

35:44So the corruption process has to be taken very seriously. And our experience with citizens assembly is up to this point. It's been almost completely corruption-free. But that's not proof positive that if they had real power, we would have to institute new procedures to protect. Maybe you'd sequester the jury. They'd stay in a hotel and they'd only get the witnesses. They were selected by the advisory board that had people on both sides of the issue selecting the experts. The details will evolve over time. I guess the question that I would have though is that my understanding is that there have been a variety of scenarios wherein these sortition assemblies produce a binding outcome. This is the answer to, and it's enforced and that's going to happen and it's in the law or whatever. But there's other situations like you say where it's advisory. So where are we with that mix right now and are people ready to accept this as a legislative outcome?

36:46There are very few where they're directly binding unless what's happened like in Australia, the New Democracy Foundation facilitates a lot of citizens assemblies there. And they usually extract a commitment from the city council or the state legislature or whatever say, if we do all the work to organize the citizens assembly, we need to know up front that there's at least a moral, if not a legal requirement that you agree that you're going to adopt what they come up with. And so that is the way that they do it there. But it's not a legal requirement because it hasn't been enacted into the law. But the experience has been, for example, in Melbourne, Australia, the city council had a 10-year capital budget which they didn't have enough revenue stream to fund all the things that they had planned. And they didn't know what to do. They didn't want to cut some of these capital investments because they knew they were going to get in hot water with their constituents that they did. They didn't want to raise taxes because they get in hot water with other constituents so they did, so you know what they did? They put together a citizen assembly, 43 randomly selected taxpayers.

37:50And that body met for a while, deliberated, came up with a unanimous recommendation. And politicians, quite frankly, did not adopt 100% of it, but the bulk of it they did. And other places like in Ireland, people in the United States may have heard that some years ago they amended their constitution to allow same-sex marriage in referendum. And a few years later, they amended their constitution again to take out the ban on abortion which had been inserted, I think, in the 1960s. But what Americans who read the news never heard because American press didn't talk about this, the politicians in this Catholic country didn't want to tackle these issues. So they set up a randomly selected constitutional convention, two different constitutional conventions, randomly selected that took a whole lot of expert witnesses, a whole lot of opinions from people from all sides, deliberated, and came up with a recommended amendment to the constitution which then the legislature,

38:51sent to referendum and passed by over two thirds majority, both of those. This Catholic country, randomly selected people, came up with a recommendation, went to referendum, passed overwhelmingly. So these kinds of models show that these citizens' assemblies do actually reflect the sentiment of the population, the values and ethics of the population. Yeah, and I could see in that kind of an environment where you're dealing with a contentious issue with a country that has various cultural histories around it. There's a sort of a truth and reconciliation aspect to this where, by getting the moral authority of the population to engage with it, there is a sense that the outcome of it is just and something that people can live with. And there's one little anecdote that I read about that in the Irish citizens assembly, the convention on same sex marriage, there, one of the randomly selected people, as a man who as a child had been sexually abused by a gay man.

40:05And he was dead set against this. He considered gay man to be predators and horrible people. It happened that one of the other, I think it was 150, I forgot the exact number of people, members happened to be a gay man. They had lunch together several times. They became close friends. They both developed an understanding of how someone has the views that they have. And they've, what I understand, they've remained friends ever since. And they both changed their perspectives because of this interaction where you would never have that in the legislature. The two parties, I guarantee you, maybe back in the 50s, they would eat together in the cafeteria in Congress. But nowadays, there's very little social interaction. It's like you don't even even be talking to members of the other. We hear the occasional story about two people from different parties that are friends and they hang out or whatever. But it's not as camaraderie like it used to be. And you know, your story about the guy who made the friends with the gay guy, there was a campaign in California a few years ago for gay marriage.

41:21And what they found was that it was door knocking by gay people going door to door and saying, hi, you know, I wanted to talk to you about this bill. How do you feel about it? And they would say, oh, I'm really against it. You know, I don't think that those people should be allowed to marry. Well, I'm a gay person. Do you think I should be allowed to marry? And then like, oh, you seem nice enough. And then it would kind of go from there. And so I think this kind of social knitting is a key part that can come from this. I think quite frankly that that concept is a problem is politicians have an incentive campaign almost an imperative to demonize and have an enemy to attack. It's hatred and fear, particularly in the age of social media, are the things that get things, you know, they've done these studies. Things that name a particular person of the other party who did something horrible. Those get reshared and liked or with angry emoji or whatever.

42:21And so politicians have learned it's not necessarily the politicians are evil or want to promote hatred within society, but they feel obliged to do that because they be fools as candidates to not promote fear and hatred. And so they do they promote fear and hatred and it's not just I mean the politicians may wink and not know that the guy across the aisle is actually a decent guy, but they can't let their voters know that. And so it filters into society and it used to be you could have a Republican and a democratic leaning person fall in love and get married and there's no big deal about it. Today that's almost that's almost unheard of people have segregated themselves into enemy camps and it's it's it's and funny thing is when you get into one of these citizens assemblies like in the one and I in fact I visited the one in Connecticut recently Helena Landemore, which is a Yale professor from France, but she's works at Yale.

43:26She organized this with some state officials and the they're at the round tables that you know that's like a hundred or 89 people I think and they and they will have subgroups where they will meet at tables and they'll divide up and go into different tables. And they're talking and none of them know the politics of each other they're just talking about property taxes and what should we do about this and what are the politicians and and they're they're creating these bonds and friendships completely without regard to people's partisan politics and it's it's beautiful. Yeah, no, I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about this time in history is that you know when you interact with people online you pick up all of these sort of tribal indicators that you know show what their party affiliation is and we've kind of got into the point where people kind of fall into like one camp versus the other. There's been some papers that I've seen on this where we're effectively achieving like a bimodal distribution of political camps so you know we detect you know this person is that kind of person when you're walking around but you know well I just have a little anecdote I love to talk about this about I'll give one for the Democrats one for the Republicans.

44:40Yes, they have put themselves into camps but they're not based on policy they're based on loyalty cultural identity kind of thing and so I thought back when Obama was present before he was president he was a supporter of single-payer universal health care but he did decide when he was president that was too hard to achieve he couldn't get the votes for that so he ended up pushing what can be known as Obamacare which was a bill which is a structure which had been passed in. It's been called Romney Care which required people to buy insurance or they would have to get a tax penalty so this was a market approach that had been initiated by think tanks on the right and promoted by Republicans Obama took it and ran with it all these Democrats stop talking about single-payer it said this is the thing yeah yeah yeah this right wing Republican proposal that's the thing for us Democrats and then the Republicans and then the Republicans no Obamacare is evil it's horrible we need to stop it and repealing Obamacare became the priority to Republicans.

45:48Even though it came out as they're in condition too. And on the other hand you can look at what's going on with like when Trump says we're going to do tariffs now for generations the Republican party had been the party of free trade. That's where it's quite frankly too but it was a pillar of the Republican thing we were for free trade we don't want government getting in the way we believe the markets will determine the best prices and best for society and growth of the economy if we don't get the government Trump says nope tariffs we're going to do in tariffs. And the Republican a few Republicans complain but basically they just yep and didn't say it's tribal parties can sort of switch positions and their party faithful just follow them. No and we've seen it a lot of times in American history too I mean the Republicans came about primarily as an anti-slavery party that was sort of really excited about having blacks have the right to vote and all of that and then you know the Democratic party of Florida had in there

46:50charter that blacks were not allowed to participate in the Democratic party they could not be delegates there they could play no role the Democratic party at that time was solely racist and the Republican party was the party about and maybe it took generations but and I can't say they swap because a lot of Republicans that are absolutely anti-racist but but just the polls should have to be discussed. I mean you went from having the Dixie crats which were this reliable sort of anti black you know faction and then you you know you had the Southern strategy and and then suddenly the Democrats are taking on the Civil Rights Act and so everything kind of shifts within like a 20 year period so you know it's it's I think important to recognize that we humans do work that way but where I was where I was getting that was that you know when you're out and about walking around and you know at the gas station or whatever and you see people they don't have signs on their heads it's say I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat. I'm a Democrat or I'm a this kind of person or whatever you know you might be able to maybe figure it out by their t-shirt or their truck or you know maybe if you're driving or the red hat or the cyber truck maybe you can kind of figure it out but otherwise you know we're all just kind of nice to people because you know like you don't know and there's no reason to be unpleasant to people and so I think that you know we can adopt that kind of a way of being with each other when we're in these kinds of you know social settings but with the question that I would ask you know what I'm saying I'm not going to talk about that.

48:16I was curious about with respect to you know this kind of sort of an environment is we've all been on juries and you know there are dominant personalities there are people who quickly want to cut through the noise and reach a conclusion and go home and watch the football game you know whatever it is they dominant personalities emerge and they and they start to quite frankly you know take over the conversation in ways that maybe aren't always productive. So I guess what I'm thinking about is like there's two potential things maybe you want to optimize for with the sort of an environment one is you want to not necessarily let the thing devolve into a contest of dominant personalities but you also I think there's a second order effect that you might want to optimize for which is this kind of social bridging social connection the building of relationships over time in a balanced way that actually contributes to societal resilience. And again that may not be a primary goal but I feel like it ought to be a secondary goal if it's not I'm curious have you identified rules or design constraints that help to sort of foster those issues.

49:25The citizens assemblies that have been going on around the world there are almost all have facilitators to keep track of who's spoken the most like you've spoken a lot we haven't heard from from Jane yet why don't we see what she is so there's that kind of facilitation but even that can be the risk is the facilitation. The risk is the facilitator becomes that that influential person that's there so so you have to it's a tricky process but yes you're right but but that's why in what I call my multi body sortition design which I wrote a couple of journal articles and so on talking about I have the idea that you don't want a body that's crafting a bill we have a lot of people giving and taking and listening to experts and to then be able to adopt that bill because the process is going to be a lot more process of crafting a bill you might have allowed mouth who who is who basically or maybe maybe just somebody who's very charismatic who's leading the group and you could have what's called group think where the group goes in a direction that no other randomly selected group would go but you had this influential person taking them there and they said oh he's he seems to know so much about the fact worse than all this so there's that danger so my idea is whenever you have this randomly selected person that you have this

50:43group. Crafting of a final bill they then handed off to a jury that don't know each other they don't they could even be online they don't necessarily have to deliberate with each other they just need to listen to a bunch of pro arguments a bunch of con arguments ask clarifying questions more pro and con and then vote because the danger is there's all kinds of dynamics like you talk about the person who takes takes the reins or or just a group think of the dynamic so that's why I said it doesn't work to just fill an existing legislative body with randomly selected people and then they adopt their rules and hire and select a speaker of the house and all kinds of you're going to recreate the the failings of the electoral system but there's one other thing I want to talk about which I haven't gotten to which is agenda setting one of my ideas in my multi body sort of design is that there would be a body randomly selected and their only task is to select agenda items. So I think that's the only task that needs to be addressed problems of society that maybe are being ignored and the problem with the agenda setting right now is it's done by politicians money and the agenda items that they favor are ones that will help mobilize the electorate once it will

52:02fear and hatred and then there's other agenda items the secret agenda where they do favors for individual lobbyists and put things in the middle of the bill in the middle of the night and reconciliation and so on. So there's the hidden agenda which most voters never know about and then there's a public agenda and I remember like when when Trump was first running for president of the United States 2015 he was campaigning in New Hampshire I'm near New Hampshire I was an actress but I have friends who were there and he talked about building the wall between Mexico and the whole room at the rally was chatting build that well build that well now these people were I don't know how many thousand miles from Mexico they it's like it wasn't something that they came to I support Donald Trump because he's going to build a wall of Mexico no no they like Donald Trump for whatever reason and there's a lot of reasons and they adopted his policy so politicians pick an agenda item that they think they can excite people about and then

53:11people try to try to identify the issues that were talking about yeah yeah so there's issues that become identifiers this one you're on the side with this issue or you're not part of our tribe and but there are other issues that get ignored like things that are boring infrastructure maintenance bridges that are rated a fall down it's like you can't do a ribbon cutting for repairing a bridge you can only do a ribbon cutting for a new bridge and so so there's dynamics that the agenda setting is is really problematic and the most extreme one in my view is climate change back in the 1980s NASA scientists gave desperate testimony to Congress formal hearings saying that they already had evidence that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was affecting the climate 1980s and they said by the early 21st century if we don't act now the cost of addressing this is going to grow monumentally and it might be too late to keep climate under control and so but Congress there was one bill that was drafted but never got out of committee because politicians realize that well if I'm one for

54:24reelection and I propose a bill that's going to cost a bunch of money that's only critical for the next generation of politicians it doesn't help me get reelected in fact it causes my opponents to be able to attack me for spending all this money to do renewable energy and so on and so they kick the can down the road decade after decade and even now a lot of politicians in the United States are still kicking that can down the road even as climate crises are becoming more and more common and so that I say elections prevented us from dealing with an urgent issue that was known because it wasn't politically beneficial for politicians reelections no that makes a lot of sense now there's a sort of elephant in the room that I think a lot of people are sensing right now which is giving me the public that well there I was thinking more about the about the role of AI and how that might be you know I'm sure there's discussions I know there's

55:25discussions about how you know those kinds of tools could be brought to bear in these environments where where do you think that conversation is going right now well AI is a terrifying thing it's it's kind of weird it's like we know what we need to do is is limit the growth of energy use and stop building fossil fuel burning plants and we need to figure out how to put a lot of resources into how to deal with flooding when it happens I mean there's things you need to do because there's going to be climate change no matter what we do we're already some questions how big it's going to be but there's things we need we need to spend money on so that this town doesn't get completely flooded every five years there's things we have to spend money on but people want to make a lot of money think well we'll spend a hundred billion dollars building power plants for data centers for AI and it's like it's just irrational and people say oh but maybe AI will figure out a solve yeah maybe

56:32maybe not I'm guessing it's sort of an economic bubble in most of these companies are going to go bankrupt within a few years but it's the the agenda setting is being done without any public oversight I think we need a very large jury of ordinary everyday people coming together charged with deciding what we're going to do about AI maybe we're going to put a pause maybe we're going to put a ban on super intelligent AI that can overrule human beings I don't know what but I don't trust politicians were taking campaign donations from AI companies and I don't trust profit seeking AI companies whose executives know that they will be fine no matter what because they will build other bunkers etc etc whether it's for climate change or whatever we need real democratic oversight of AI not in terms of the details we just need the value judgments of is getting a computer ability to write songs

57:41and make movies without human beings is that really worth is that is that a priority is that what we really need we need computer generated music right no we have people who can write music it's like we're putting all these resources into things that aren't fun and novel and amazing but none of them are essential we could easily freeze it and the idea that we're in a race with China is not it's required for a G.I. first is probably going to destroy the wall it seems like that's kind of where how things are going but I was actually coming out from maybe a slight different angle and I agree with you on most of these kinds of resource allocation issues the question that I think that some have started to raise is could you do something like create a you know sortition assembly of a bunch of autonomous AI agents each with their own expertise and point of view and simulate the kinds of outcomes that you're getting from these kinds of bodies it might be conceivable I wouldn't trust it not unless it was overseen less the the AI was controlled democratically by a system I think there's right now AI is being used in citizens assemblies for example

58:52AI is a catch all phrase I don't like because they put so many different things but for example at the they put a recording device at each of the little tables were at this Connecticut citizens assembly on property tax reform and at the end of the day they take all those recordings they have an AI write a summary of the things that were said the next morning they have all these summaries of all the table discussions they did not spend all my you know typing and working the AI did it and then each person could look at what was said oh yeah that's what I said oh this is this misrepresent me we need to change it so so it was still monitored and controlled by human beings but there's task like keeping track of how many minutes to do each person speak in the room if you have a rule that no one could speak more than five minutes until everybody else you could use it as part of the procedure AI to make it more now I do think you know also there's the possibility of doing things like you know just the simple cases like Google's notebook LM where you can dump into the text of reports and books and stuff like that and say look here's a 600 traffic you know 600 page traffic study from you know 1988 you know that's what is it what are the key points raised on these topics and it can spit out some kind of a summary there

1:00:06you know yeah but even there the risk is that the AI uses large language models summaries and so like there was one example someone talked about where where the someone was going to bring a ice cream truck to the neighborhood and people were complaining about the noise and so the AI talked about how well the trucks will have mufflers maybe they'll be electric trucks so they'll be quiet but people were talking about the jingle that the trucks are always playing the AI didn't understand the AI because most of the discussion on the internet about truck noise is not about jingle right right right right so the AI assumed things that other humans it know it's those songs that go endlessly in my neighborhood so so yeah their AI is is not it's not a panacea and it it could be and down the road it could be devastatingly catastrophically horrible yeah no I have some you know contacts friends who you know are sort of very pro AI and you know we'll say things like

1:01:11you know well all we really need is just to feed all of our problems into the AI and then it will spit out solutions that'll probably be pretty good and they'll everybody will accept them because they're you know impartial because they come from the AI and I'm like there was a star trek episode like that back in the 1960s the planet where the computer ran everything and everybody revered the computer yeah and I mean like you know unfortunately that is not how people work people you know are going to complain and get into factions and do the things that people do so I I really find that to be not a credible solution you know I guess as we move to kind of wrap up here you know what what kinds of things could people maybe think about pushing for within their own communities that would move some of this kind of approach into their governance models like how does that process work of like kind of getting started with trying some of this well there is a small organization called sortition USA that's been growing very rapidly it's a national organization and they have local chapters in various locations

1:02:18when they're trying to find venues where they could and there are experts out there who do facilitation if there's some particular thorny issue that you think a jury would do good you know like they went in California like they had a what had been a 99 year lease for a plot of land they had been a like a park or no I'd have been like a a fair grounds and the leases up they had to decide what to do with it so they did a citizens assembly so there are things where people say oh yeah this we just need to know what the people want so there and the organization sortition USA is a good resource and I can't end the interview without mentioning that I wrote a book recently that's out called democracy without politicians government by the people and thanks it's a routledge which is a large academic press but a fund was put together to pay the fee to routledge so that the ebook version is free that's great if you go to Amazon you can download the the Kindle book or the e pub or the pdf so or you can go to my website terri bruicious dot com and and download the book for free and it's I think a very important book yeah no I think this is a conversation that people need to really have and I guess you know one other question might be is it you know you mentioned that you know sometimes works best with like thorny issues that politicians kind of want to punt on is that kind of like what you've seen like the pattern is like does that usually where people get started

1:03:42um united states there's only been like uh i don't know seven or eight citizens assemblies over the last few years as opposed to like place like germany where there have been a lot over a hundred so it's like in the night the examples in the United States have mostly been local uh the one in Connecticut is the first state wide one in the United States um but but there have been states wide or national ones in in in other countries so I can't really I mean it's a it's opportunity an issue comes up say ooh this is a good place where we could use a jury like process and I can't really advocate what they would be it could be a huge issue that statewide and is very very critical or could be a little thing like what how do we how do we want to make a walkable neighborhood in this part of the world of the city I mean they'll the whole spectrum is a possibility why do you think is that why do you think it is that um Germany seems so much more receptive to this it's I don't know exactly the history because uh there were some writings about citizens assemblies in the United States but it the first modern reinvention was the one that I uh gave testimony to in British Columbia in 2004 and then there was one in iron in Iceland and then Belgium the German

1:05:03G 1000 and in Belgium there was an author who wrote a very influential book called against elections and it just sort of took off in first in Belgium and then because of the nature of the EU and so on in England and throughout Europe it took off and in meanwhile in Japan and in Australia an independent group was doing it also and it took off over there and I don't I mean the United States quite frankly for my time working on election reform people tend to think uh we don't care what they do over there you know they have to pour some more percent it's not America it's like what do we do here in America and so it's been a slow process uh in the United States but I it's it's it's growing exponentially even here beginning because there's one in you know Lexington Kentucky and and Decaturge I want places you wouldn't expect doing innovative democracy things and and it's it's it's happening more and more so I don't know exactly why the United States is lagging behind the rest of the world in democracy reform I'm guessing it's because people are so

1:06:10distracted if you will by our political dysfunction that they're the of what we have right now Congress it's doing nothing like they they refuse to actually pass laws they just want to say yes sir yes sir and uh so I'm guessing it's just the the unique political crises we've been having in the United States lately yeah probably also looking down the road is hard attitudes about sort of how politics should work and you know we're kind of fixed with we're not typically too receptive to coming up with kind of like wild new ideas now along those lines I'm going to close with this question um and it's a little bit different topic then what we've been talking about but in your capacity is an election expert um what is your take on sort of the security and safety of American elections heading into the midterms uh they have been safe and secure for a long time there have been back in the 1960s there was probably a paper ballot box stuffing Chicago there's

1:07:17various stories of things where I believe there was corruption I think most of that has been eliminated over the last you know 40 years and so basically there is no corruption in the election systems that I know of in any state right now however one of the things that really terrifies me is back in the early part of the 20th century there were some people elected I think from Wisconsin and Minnesota who were members of the small socialist party and Congress uh which has the authority to rule on the qualifications of its members has the presidential legal authority to refuse to seat members even if they're duly elected what I'm terrified of is the idea that if the election doesn't go the way certain party wants to obstruct it so there may be a move to try and say oh his election was also corrupt and so we're not going to seat these people right and then the whole um constitutional order comes to a climactic crisis um I foresee that as a real possibility within two months

1:08:28yeah now and that's that's kind of what I'm trying to prep for is you know how to message people about what the real risks are here because I'm in agreement with you that you know as far as anybody can tell you know election physical election security has been very very good for about at least the last 20 years um the fact is that all the all the elections except Louisiana are now done on paper ballots that might be read by a machine to get quick results but there's a record there's a paper ballot that can be recounted and they get recounted like in Georgia when Trump was complaining that they stole again they reeked they did like two or three recounts and got the same results with using the paper ballots that so it's like yeah I think it's like 99% of the country's right and able to determine as long as people get their ballots and the ballots get processed which is also now I think it's up yeah I know I guess I just you know I really want to have folks you know there's a lot of reasons to to be concerned and things to be concerned about right now I really want to be concerned about the right thing so I think that you know you're

1:09:30you're concerned about what happens after an election and the results don't go the way they want that to me is like that kind of law fair landscape is is more where my heads out than you know bit flipping and in computers somewhere all right well again thank you so much for taking the time with me today Terry it's been a wonderful conversation I'm very glad yeah and uh thank you very much looking forward to sharing this with our audience and have you back again maybe after the elections okay thanks for joining us for episode five season four of Dave Troy presents Terry baritious's book is titled Democracy Without Politicians government by the people from Routledge and here's the unusual part it is open access the entire book is free you can download it at democracy without politicians dot org that's democracy without politicians all one word dot org and if you want somewhere to start he points listeners to sortition USA at sortition USA dot org they have local chapters and we'll link to it all in the show notes and as always you can find my work at america 2.0 a website where I share articles and other quality content about the

1:10:37future of democracy in america and around the world and you can find it at america to that's america with the number two dot news this is the easiest way to stay up to date with everything I'm doing and you can subscribe to get emailed anytime we post something new if you like you can also choose to become a subscriber and help support this work as always you can find me under the name Dave Troy on mastodon at toad.social and on x and now also on blue sky and you can also find my writing at the Washington spectator at washington spectator dot org thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time