You Have Been Expelled From Politics
25th June 2024
In a short story published in 1955, Isaac Asimov imagined America’s Presidential election day in 2008. Amid intense excitement, the entire world watches on as an ordinary citizen is led forward to cast his vote — the only vote needed in the entire country, since he had been chosen by a supercomputer to be the completely representative citizen that year.
Asimov was inspired by CBS News’s Remington Rand UNIVAC I computer, which correctly predicted a landslide for Eisenhower on election night 1952 after only 3 million votes had been counted and Adlai Stevenson was ahead. It was the first instance of what has become a familiar feature of US elections, to the degree that most people treat the “calling” of the result early in the evening by the networks as the actual outcome of the election.
Asimov’s fantasy was a prophetic reductio ad absurdum of something which has played a steadily increasing role in modern politics: the idea that citizens can be represented by a carefully designed system in which they play no active role. The vogue for citizen juries is an illustration of this, while a number of theorists have gone even further and proposed that actual legislative assemblies should be chosen through some kind of lottery — what is technically termed “sortition”. The processes of voting and elections, on this account, are messy and corruptible: far better to have a system which is genuinely representative of public opinion. And a citizen jury will represent the population better than a committee of elected legislators scrutinising the same material.