Well, just to calibrate, I find it plausible that a literally random lottery for all high offices would be an improvement. Maybe with some very basic inclusion criteria, so that every election cycle we get a basically normal person to just fuck around and find out. They will be largely ineffectual and ridiculous and powerless.

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I have also fantasized about a kind of "Dunbar Tree" election system. There are a bunch of tricky details, but pick a number around 100, and at the base level a community of 100 people elects your rep from among themselves. Then the 100 communities surrounding you on the social graph or geographically or something would have their 100 reps elect a single rep. Etc to the top. Looking at the population of the US, you'd only have 5 layers of heirarchy here, with the 4th level being like 3 or 4 people.

You could imagine some clever delineation of powers so that each layer was a local legislature and the group rep and/or layer above was the executive of the previous layer. Maybe not exactly that, but the idea is that people closer to the ground would say how they want things to go for their small group, and the people with coordination power above them would be in charge of making it happen.

You'd need some kind of smart (read: hard to game) way to dynamically define the groups, and you'd need some law/mechaism to prevent top down election interference.

This also doesn't fundamentally solve the problem I talked about in another thread in which no one knows how to actually run a nationstate of this complexity, and people are still collectively shortsighted, but it does subvert hyperoptimized national PR campaigns, and ground the election at each level in an animal relationship between people you can actually know and track your real feelings about. It puts very different selection pressure on who ends up at the top which isn't a promise that it's better, but but I expect basically any change in the selection pressure to better on the margin right now.

This isn't like a manifesto I believe in, more like a fever dream, but this is the sort of thing I have in mind when I say "surely thoughtful, knowledgable people could come up with something--anything--that might plausibly be better."

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The absolute least we could do that would slightly improve things is ranked choice voting.

democratic processes