One interesting alternative to voting for those who are unable to participate in a tightly contested New Hampshire primary might be to help pay for the creation of a randomly selected nationally representative paid (providing full salary replacement if necessary to ensure high participation rates) private ‘jury’ to study the candidates and issues and ultimately vote its preferences.
Initially this would have no legal force, but it could reveal systematic differences between the decisions of the actual electorate and a representative sample treated for greater information and serious exposure to diverse views (through the diversity of the assembly membership). Moreover, if we expect greater access to information, incentives for correct decision-making, deliberation in a politically mixed body, etc, to lead to good recommendations the expected value could be high relative to buying bed nets.
One could conduct numerous experiments with small juries and modest periods for investigation and deliberation, e.g. 25 people deliberating for a week, so that stochastic effects influencing the votes of multiple jury members do not invalidate the study.
Other juries could be random samples of interesting subsets of the general population, like economists or PhDs.
One interesting alternative to voting for those who are unable to participate in a tightly contested New Hampshire primary might be to help pay for the creation of a randomly selected nationally representative paid (providing full salary replacement if necessary to ensure high participation rates) private ‘jury’ to study the candidates and issues and ultimately vote its preferences.
Initially this would have no legal force, but it could reveal systematic differences between the decisions of the actual electorate and a representative sample treated for greater information and serious exposure to diverse views (through the diversity of the assembly membership). Moreover, if we expect greater access to information, incentives for correct decision-making, deliberation in a politically mixed body, etc, to lead to good recommendations the expected value could be high relative to buying bed nets.
One could conduct numerous experiments with small juries and modest periods for investigation and deliberation, e.g. 25 people deliberating for a week, so that stochastic effects influencing the votes of multiple jury members do not invalidate the study.
Other juries could be random samples of interesting subsets of the general population, like economists or PhDs.