Whenever an election approaches, Americans hear political partisans arguing with increasing intensity that if we would just vote for them and the co-conspirators in their party, it would create the best of all possible worlds. However, many people suspect that doing so would produce the opposite result. People occasionally even propose (sometimes facetiously) that rather than things becoming as good as it gets if only the appropriate party were put in charge, we might be better off if we selected those who represented us by lot. Jazz Shaw did that recently at HotAir. And he cited very interesting recent polling from Rasmussen on that score. More than half (54 percent) of those surveyed, the most in any iteration of the survey, thought that random selection of politicians would produce better results for Americans. And this was before the presidential debate. In fact, only half as many people (27 percent) thought that we would not be better served by such an approach. Shaw then playfully discussed a few issues that might arise from implementing such an approach. But he didn’t seriously consider how improved incentives and results might arise from doing so. However, Leonard Read, the fountainhead of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), did think more deeply about such a situation in his 1964 book Anything That’s Peaceful, offering some insights worth considering. Read contrasted choosing most officeholders by lot for single terms with the current system, in which politicians and their partisans “compete to see which one can get himself in front of the most popular voter grab bag in order to stand foursquare for some people’s supposed right to other people’s income.” To seriously suggest such a comparison seems outlandish, since “voting is deeply embedded in the democratic mores as a duty.” On the other hand, Read noted that “any person who is conscious of our rapid drift toward the omnipotent state can hardly escape the suspicion that there may be a fault in our habitual way of looking at things,” a conclusion far truer six decades later. His argument began with the essential underlying question that must inform such a comparison: What is the appropriate role of government? “If it be conceded,” following America’s founders, “that the role of government is to secure ‘certain unalienable rights, that among them are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ by what stretch of the imagination can this be achieved when we vote for those who are openly committed to unsecuring these rights?” Read concluded that there would be a sharp contrast if we selected our political representatives by lot: With nearly everyone conscious that only “ordinary citizens” were occupying political positions, the question of who should rule would lose its significance. Immediately, we would become acutely aware of the far more important question: What shall be the extent of the rule? That we would press for a severe limitation of the state seems almost self-evident. He thought that, rather than voting being largely determined by who most effectively packages those Constitutional violations which would transfer the most resources to the voters in question—necessarily at others’ expense—people would focus on something like: “What does government do better for us with our own resources than we could do ourselves?” The current bipartisan momentum toward ever-larger government would be reversed. “Political parties [thus made] more or less meaningless—would cease to exist.” As a consequence, there would be “no more campaign speeches with their promises of how much better we would fare were the candidates to spend our income for us.” It would cause “an end to campaign fund-raising” and eliminate “self-chosen ‘saviors’ catering to base desires in order to win elections.” Since political parties are largely coalitions of invaders of others’ rights, voting to shift control from one coalition to the other cannot defend everyone’s rights. But selection by lot would eliminate any such power to bundle promises as to who is Peter and who is Paul in the “robbing Peter to pay Paul” political game. That would also undermine the lies that must presently be sold and free up the massive resources now dedicated to “selling” them. And a likely beneficial side-effect would be to lower many Americans’ blood pressure. It would usher in “an end to that type of voting in Congress which has an eye more to re-election than to what’s right.” It must also be remembered that, while many argue that re-election prospects provide incentives for politicians to advance American society, they also provide incentives to increase the harm imposed on those not in the dominant political coalition, as a means to keep their own coalition in office. And when the Constitution and, perhaps even more so, the vision of the Declaration of Independence have come to be honored more in the breach than the observance, Read thinks the latter incentive now dominate

The person who gets the most votes wins. 0:05 Let's talk about this. 0:07 In the US, 0:08 we basically have two choices in elections. 0:13 And... listen. 0:15 It's not going amazing. 0:16 “Government shutdown” 0:16 “Split Congress” 0:18 “Great divide” 0:19 “Cannot agree” 0:20 “Too polarized” 0:21 “Big majorities don't want either one of them running.” 0:24 Big majorities of us actually don't want the two-party system at all. 0:27 We want more options. 0:30 But a lot of the time, 0:32 we actually do have more options. 0:36 It's just that, when it comes time to vote for them, 0:39 we mostly don't. 0:41 We kind of can't. 0:43 In our system, voting for a third party 0:46 helps the party you least agree with. 0:48 It's just a protest vote. 0:51 But there's a way 0:52 we could make it more than that. 0:55 We just need to take a closer look at this. Winner take all elections 1:05 New England. 1:06 The northeastern region of the US. 1:08 About 15 million people live here. 1:10 These six states send 21 Representatives to Congress. 1:15 And in the 2022 Congressional elections, 1:18 36% of voters here voted for Republicans. 1:23 But none of this region's 21 Representatives are Republicans. 1:27 It means that the perspective of the New England Republicans, 1:30 who have historically been fiscally conservative 1:32 and more socially progressive, is not reflected in Congress. 1:36 This is because of the way we elect Representatives to Congress, 1:40 where every Representative comes from a different district, 1:43 each district holds its own election, 1:46 and in each election, 1:47 the person who gets the most votes wins. 1:50 These are “winner take all” elections. 1:52 And they produce this result all over the country. 1:55 Take the state of Oklahoma. 1:57 Oklahoma has five Congressional districts. 1:59 It votes one third Democratic. 2:02 It has no Democratic Representatives. 2:06 And before we start blaming gerrymandering for this, 2:08 in other words, the shape of these districts, 2:10 in Massachusetts, which I admit does look kind of gerrymandered, 2:15 a group of independent mapmakers looked at this situation. 2:19 And they tried to draw new district maps 2:21 that would give Republicans some representation here. 2:25 But they found that, “though there are more ways of building 2:28 a districting plan than particles in the galaxy, 2:31 every single one would produce a 9-0 Democratic delegation.” 2:35 And now imagine if, 2:37 in every single House race, there was also a really popular 2:40 third party, getting 25% of the vote, 2:44 in every district in the country. 2:46 That party would earn... 2:48 zero seats in Congress. 2:51 If you ask yourself, why haven't you voted for a third party, 2:54 most of the time it’s, well, they don't really have a chance. 2:56 Our system, by its very nature, precludes political competition. 3:00 But most democracies 3:02 don't actually work