Apparently the results of a tied election in Spearfish, Dakota Territories came down to shooting craps, pulling marbles out of bags, and all but playing "rock, paper, scissors" to determine a winner.
I thought to myself, "Y'know, that sounds as sensible as what we have already, so why not just dispense with the whole 'voting' part and let some peroxide blonde pull winner's names out of a drum on stage between the evening news and Conan O'Brien? You could hand out Congressional Race Entry Forms in Mickey D's value meals and besides, random chance couldn't possibly turn up worse candidates than Al Franken..."
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I like the Lewis Black method. Pick a zip code via lotto machine, Parachute a chimp out of a plane, over that zip code,and the first person the chimp touches is the new electee.
Like you have said, what could be the danger? And those who were smart enough not to run for office would just have to stay inside on that day.
Didn't someone say regarding Massachusets that he;s rather be governed by 500 names chosen at random out of the Boston phonebook than the elected clowns he got?
I used to laugh about that, now I cry.
*sigh*
My home territory. I served a term... er... attended one semester of college in Spearfish before transferring to the "civilization" of Nebraska.
Luckily, the most important thing the council can screw up is what to do when the snow collapses the Wal-Mart roof, as it does every winter.
In Athens votes were put into a series of jars, and then one of the jars was selected at random. Non-selected jars had their votes discarded.
The votes from the selected jar were then distributed into the other jars, and the process was repeated until one vote was selected.
The statistics of that process are interesting. The majority has an advantage, but doesn't always win. Every vote has a chance.
It was Bill Buckley, it was the first two thousand names, and the preference was over the (then) two thousand Harvard faculty members.
And I've long advocated a randomly selected legislature. And a 3/4 majority of it to do ANYTHING.
I've often suspected that selection of representatives by lobby would produce results at least as good as the processes we have now. It could hardly do worse.
That's if we can't go with 'live steel, free for all, last one standing'.
Arrrgh. I meant lottery.
It's called sortition, and was once widely used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
We knew what you meant- we already HAVE selection by lobby.
I LOL'ed.
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