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September 24, 2025

lots to experience

why life in an open democracy could be less stressful, more connected, and more meaningful than life in an electoral system

What would it be like to live in an open democracy? How would it feel? How would life be different if our local, state and national policies were guided primarily by assemblies chosen at random? In essence, what would the user experience be in Democracy 3.0?

A loved one wondered as much and pictured a sense of loss. "I'm imagining the experience of sitting out voting during an election cycle and instead waiting for my call..." She painted a sweet and recognizable portrait of an Election Day she would miss. "Old timers dress up and people full of patriotic spirit get their stickers, bring their kids, etc. We all feel in step with...other Americans that day."

She's right; there are genuinely pockets of Election Day adorableness: stickers, flags, countless volunteers, chatty lines... all the idiosyncrasies of your local polling station (assuming your polling station has the resources it needs). And I don't poopoo the value of these expressions of community and identity.

But the election experience has its downsides, too. Start with the ballot. To me, navigating my ballot choices is less a sacred rite and more an exercise of futility and farce. First I fill in the top-line races, very familiar from months of bitter warfare. Here we go again, sending "representatives" to deliberative bodies after destroying their capacity to deliberate. Again we distill all the variety and beauty of the minds of our nation into picking red or blue. It all feels a bit hopeless.

Then there are all the down-ballot choices. Roles I barely understand, people I know little about, abstruse-sounding ballot initiatives. I dig in and do some research, and the paucity of information together with the unlikeliness that my effort will have any effect on the outcomes combine to ooze the unescapable scent of busy work. Insiders have already done the real work; I'm literally ticking boxes.

After voting, the Election Day experience is mostly about media intake. Increasingly this feels like war coverage, with rampant accusations of cheating and suppression and general ill will. I feel in step with other Americans through these trials only to the extent that they too feel sad and stressed and disheartened.

Potentially there is also a shared feeling of relief, at least. Thank heavens the months of campaigning and horse race commentary and memes and mailers and melodramatic ads are done. The collective exhale is usually swamped, though, by the blend of triumphalism and despair that accompanies the rollout of results. The fight goes on.

For many of us there is an uncomfortable calculus throughout those long elections. Should I be doing more? Would it make a difference? Can I really stand aside? So perhaps we donate or write letters or make calls or knock on doors or organize parties. Maybe we manage to quiet our conscience, maybe we even get to say our side won, but I doubt any of us feel like we're making the whole ordeal any less gross.

And much of the ick lasts well beyond elections. The lingering animosity, the social sorting by party identity, the antipathy among lawmakers, the narrative of the need for constant public oversight lest everything crumble... We move from campaign to constituency and back and little seems to change. The fight goes on.

So no, on the whole, I don't enjoy elections. I don't enjoy campaigns. I don't enjoy politics. They make me feel like my country has mistaken its muzzle for a megaphone. It's so odd to celebrate any of this as a "voice". Few of us are ever involved in any decisions of consequence for our town, our state, or our country. Candidates get to talk about ideas, at least in soundbites; we just get to talk about candidates. Or maybe just to chant their names. Surely there's more to real democracy than that.

Everyone's experience is their own, of course, but a recent Ipsos poll found that some 88% of US citizens felt that democracy was broken. For partisan folks it was even higher. Yeah, on a high level, I do feel in step with other Americans there.


So, what if we didn't have elections?

For clarity's sake, let's imagine a rather extreme if unlikely future: a pure lottocracy. There are no elections at all, just mini-publics, folks appointed by them, and folks appointed by appointees.

Perhaps the hardest part of this to imagine is feeling respect for and trust in the people making important decisions, especially on the national level. According to Gallup's tracking polls congressional approval ratings have for twenty years lingered almost entirely in the teens and twenties, with a couple of brief adventures in the thirties. Congress has not reached 40% approval since 2004. And even 40% approval would be god awful. Why don't we just vote them out? The short answer is that most of us like our own representatives well enough and we keep reelecting them. It's just all those other people we despise.

This is not the time to piece apart all the dynamics that have led to this situation, why it works just fine for politicians, why it doesn't work at all for us, how Congress actively drives its own popularity down, or why we're so intractably stuck here. But consider whether you believe any of this is true of the US Congress or state legislatures today:

  • they study the issues deeply
  • they deliberate sincerely without making up their minds prematurely
  • they accurately represent the broader population
  • they work to embrace the best ideas of all participants
  • they see the good in each other
  • they're not playing cheap political tricks
  • they produce in-depth accounts of their decisions
  • their thinking is not clouded by the personal benefits they receive from their role

Our elected bodies fail on every count. Meanwhile, in our imagined future, our lottocracy, there's every reason to believe every single one of these will be true. That's just how mini-publics work.

It's not because mini-public people are better; it's because the incentives are. Unless we've run for office, we don't know how we would react to the perverse incentives of electoral politics. Most likely, we would either play the game or we would lose. (Or, commonly enough, both).

But we would also likely respond well to the much healthier and generative incentives of mini-publics. When it's our turn to take part, we would listen, we would learn, we would weigh, we would ponder, we would connect, we would decide, and we would go back to the rest of our life feeling pretty damned good about our contribution. These things are true of mini-publics. They're true of jury duty, even.

Unlike jury duty, though, our mini-public experience wouldn't be working on a narrow criminal accusation or civil beef. We'd be working on something larger... perhaps health policy or urban planning or judicial appointments or state budgeting... something that gives us a sense of shared purpose with our randomly selected colleagues. Something with meaning.

Many of us have experienced the joy of working with teams of very different types of people to come to agreement around difficult issues. All of us should get that chance. In an era where many traditionally human tasks are being outsourced to machines, we really need to hold onto the magic of a small group of people in earnest deliberation. It's deeply, deeply human.

And if we knew that's how our collective decisions were being made, it would be a heck of a lot easier to trust them.


So the rest of the time, when we weren't serving on a mini-public, would we just be waiting for a call, like a wistful adolescent with an unrequited crush? Of course not. There will always be ways to get involved in the issues we care about. We can organize, we can write, we can study, we can gather...

And we can feed the mini-publics. There are already nascent efforts to create means for nonparticipants to contribute to deliberations: tools that help consolidate claims and perspectives that the mini-publics can weigh, for example. Some of these are rather light touch; you can participate without much investment. Others, like developing schools of thought for testimony to mini-publics are much more intensive.

But, importantly, part of the magic of a lottocracy is that when you don't feel passionately about an issue and aren't selected for a mini-public, you really don't have to feel guilty about checking out. A big part of the experience of lottocracy is that we actually get to exhale.

This is not necessarily true of electoral democracy, where the subtext is that, without the constant vigilance of the entire citizenry, everything might go off the rails. We recognize the system is vulnerable to corruption, and so we all have to keep an eye on everything all the time. If someone is caught abusing power and the public doesn't get sufficiently upset about it, they might get away with it. The whole thing falls apart without hypervigilance and outrage. What kind of system design is that? Either everyone in the system lives on high alert or the whole thing fails?

Things would feel quite tranquil by comparison in a lottocracy, where there are many fewer opportunities for corruption and many more checks and balances. Without campaigns, there's no campaign fundraising. Without career politicians, there are far fewer connections to peddle. When the only contact deliberators have with lobbyists is in public learning sessions, there are no backroom deals.

So, even when you aren't in a mini-public, you can trust that people like you are, and you can trust that they are there to deliberate, not to hold onto power. And when you genuinely trust the system, you can step away. You contribute deeply and meaningfully when you're deliberating, and you can guiltlessly focus on whatever you choose when you're not.


Of course, a pure lottocracy in America is highly unlikely any time soon. Even if we succeed in calling mini-public constitutional conventions, it's very hard to see them agreeing in large majorities to do away with elections of governors or presidents, for example. At least in my lifetime.

It's much easier to imagine the gradual emergence of a hybrid democratic system. We would still have elections, but deliberative bodies would increasingly be replaced by systems of mini-publics, and many positions of authority would increasingly be appointed by them.

In this world, we can imagine Election Day evolving into Democracy Day, a national holiday celebrating the fullness of an evolving democracy. We'll still get the stickers, the flags, the chatty lines... We might also have ceremonial random selection, celebrations of completed terms, roundtables for generating ideas for new mini-publics, etc.

So, yes, let's keep the special day. Let's continue to cherish our communities and national identity. But let's do it in a way that doesn't create so much anxiety and enmity. Not only can we make America more democratic, we can make it more livable.

Read more →

  • Aug 26, 2025

    lots to heal

    American democracy's poor health is structural, and so is the remedy.

    Read article →
  • Aug 30, 2025

    lots to imagine

    a brief journey to an imaginary lottocracy

    Read article →
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Join the discussion:
Michael M
Sep. 28, 2025, evening

(Though you do touch upon these in the essay — I think there’s more to explore on this.. ) it is not fair of me to bring up issues that are potential hazards of this model when we already have the same problem ensconced firmly in the present model - and this model is already better by decoupling from the campaign/election cycle, but once empowered as a participant of the mini public, these minipublicans are potentially subject to direct influence/lobby efforts (tho not in sense that they have to keep lobbyist happy to get re-elected / re-allotted - as that’s not in the design) but we need some ethical framework and guardrails nonetheless. Or is such influence thought to be mitigated by it likely being rare, or only a few who may succumb to enticements or pressure? I don’t underestimate the potential of deep pockets to attempt by every means necessary and at scale whatever they deem will get them their way.

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Michael M
Sep. 28, 2025, evening

Other thought related to this post (thought it deserved it’s own space)— the lottery establishing a minipub cohort - is intended to be derived from the full body of citizens. Assume they have the right to decline, or no? And are their business/employment situations expected to be protected/covered in some matter? An operational detail to be sure, but it becomes important. It’s one thing to require re-employment of employers whose staff may be appointed (and I am sure some will argue against this as unfair to employer…) and it’s another question entirely whether one can shut down one’s personal enterprise and livelihood for the period in question. Maybe it’s not a heavy demand for local issues or specific policy questions - but are we considering states or the national gov might have a standing Minipub assembly for a specific length of time - perhaps I am confused as to durations here. We’re hoping for this in place of a legislature, or in support of it - a hybrid? If the latter- does this sufficiently tamp down the negatives of the electoral model? (I recognize you do mention hybrid or hybrid stage, but I wonder if the long term a hybrid remains necessary.)

All these are intended as from a stance of friendliness to the model, not nitpicking.

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Ethan McCutchen
Sep. 29, 2025, afternoon

These are all excellent questions (and it's very helpful for me to hear them in terms of thinking through future topics). I'm still reading and learning about them but do have some leanings.

The thing I can say quickly is that I imagine (and hope for) lots of experimentation with different solutions to these issues. There's already a lot of different practices in terms of duration, size, remuneration, etc. There is less experimentation with fully empowered citizen legislatures so far, not surprisingly. And because the assemblies are generally not all that powerful yet, there isn't YET that much need for experimentation with guardrails. But the more powerful they become, the more important guardrails will become.

I will say now (and elaborate later!) that I think mini-publics have some inherent advantages over elected bodies in the corruption sphere, both in the sense of illegal corruption (eg payoffs) and the broader frame of corruption that Lessig and others use (undue influence). Some advantages, as you mentioned, involve the election cycle directly; the susceptibility to corruption there is obvious. But partisan politics and the uneven distribution of power within elected bodies also make elected bodies an easier target.

To my mind, preventing corruption in mini-publics seems like a real but addressable problem. You can do much more than you can under elections to limit access and to censure inappropriate behavior, both on the part of representatives and on those who'd seek to influence them.

The harder-to-solve challenge in my mind will be how to combat the use of conventional politics against mini-publics writ large once powerful entities begin to feel threatened by them. They won't have to attack individual members (though they might); they'll just have to destroy the reputations of mini-publics themselves. I take it for granted that conventional professional politicos these days have highly honed skills in reputation destruction that they can aim wherever they like.

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