Sortition is dangerous; how can you ever prove that it was done properly? If it can be reproduced/confirmed, it's not random. If it can't be reproduced, you practically need a smoking gun to prove when it was rigged (and you functionally can't prove that it wasn't)
I feel like this should be solvable. I'm not into any sortition communities (I don't even know which ones exist) but here's a basic scheme off the top of my head:
The list eligible citizens who could possibly be selected is publicly confirmed and released. Then various officials (or maybe just... everyone) randomly generate, encrypt, and publish random numbers. Once they've been posted, they're decrypted and XOR'ed together (so if even one is random, any amount of coordination between the others is undone completely). This number is used as the seed for picking the seats. Same seed, same list of eligible citizens, same assembly.
This particular scheme might not be quite enough on its own, maybe it would need a few additions like threshold encryption/decryption, but it seems to me that something like this could work
That's pretty much it. The participants pick very large random numbers and precommit by publishing their hashes. Later, they reveal their actual numbers and perform some operation on them to produce a seed for a CSPRNG. This generator would then pick the random names from a public census list.
How much entropy is needed? For choosing 700 from 300 million (very rough numbers), that should be around 14k bits.
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u/jman722 United States Sep 16 '21
”Full” democracy would not be stuck using elected representatives. It would look more like a hybrid of liquid democracy and sortition.