specific procedures

[Clay S]

now I'm starting to think about specific process. Dylan thinks the jurors should be brought up to speed on civics and all this stuff. in my opinion, that requires something like an impartial judge, which is a fantasy. there's no way to get impartiality, so you want to make use of the fact that every candidate is partial to themselves. and it's fair because every candidate gets equal time to be their own advocate.

i mean, imagine a trumpist judge who thinks everyone needs to be "brought up to speed" on the need to make trump a king, and he appoints "expert witnesses" who make that case.

my view: the person who runs things procedurally should be a referee not a judge. we want to imply that they are just following the rules, like telling people when it's their turn to present and when their time is up. we certainly don't want them picking expert witnesses or deciding what topics the jury needs to hear about. If you are a candidate trying to make the case for why land value taxes or universal basic income are good idea, you have every opportunity to make your case, present data on slides, and even call expert witnesses. we might do something like give every candidate a certain allotment of money they can use to pay expert witnesses and they can only use those funds and no other form of compensation to try to make it more fair.

I imagine a system kind of like chess where everybody has a fixed amount of time and they take turns presenting and cross examining. in each subsequent round of presentation you essentially can cross examine previous speakers by responding to their points. it might be useful in some cases to have a back and forth so maybe you have a hybrid, where like everybody presents for up to an hour, but then anybody who wants to get in line to have a back and forth with you can use their time on the clock and they control that time just like people in Congress. so if you don't like the way the current presenter is answering your questions you are free to cut them off and steer things however you like because it's your time. when you're done you can stop the clock and it's the next person's turn to speak.

can the jury ask questions? I would say so but this question should be submitted to the referee who will ask them, to anonymize the juror. it turns out that whether normal juries can ask questions varies from state to state by the way!

The process is over when everyone has done their required presentation and used up their clock time or ceded it.

how much time should that be? i'm not sure what's ideal. maybe a typical trial process should be a week to a month, depending on the scale, like city council vs house representative. but i would argue it doesn't matter too much, because even if it's just a day, that's already VASTLY better than the status quo, where people basically vote with a Ouija board.

thoughts?

[Clay S]

oh, i'm definitely recommending score voting for the actual vote. ideally non-proportional, for reasons i can go into later.

[Rajiv Prabhakar]

I agree with the idea of a "referee" who enforces rules, but doesn't take an active role in fact-finding, selecting witnesses etc. The leading political parties are certainly capable of figuring out the best arguments they can put forward.

I've taken a first pass at rewriting the site-homepage, and also added a FAQ section that goes into the above in more detail. Lmk what you guys think.

https://www.electionbyjury.org/

Regarding time limits, Q&A, ballot type, etc, I don't have a strong opinion. There's definitely a ton of room for variation and innovation within the election-by-jury framework. I suspect that people will get freaked out by too many things changing at once, and would be more open to an election-by-jury if we implemented the other innovations iteratively.

Regards,
Rajiv

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[Clay S]

what i'm suggesting is a minimal default template that one could tweak on a case by case basis. when advocating for deep technical subjects like this, we've found it useful to have something like the layers of an onion peel. at the top level it's just the concise vision statement. then there are links to deeper persuasive pieces, faq type stuff, model implementations. i think we can gradually start to structure the site that way. we could make the home page much more concise, with the zinger of an opening, about which option you'd prefer for your own criminal trial.

then we can link to our purpose and vision statement for a deeper dive. faq, etc.

if you look at http://scorevoting.net/ (which is currently taking a long time to load), the top page is way too busy, but it does manage to stash tons of deeper dive pages into a left nav and search bar. ces does this too, though they have radically less deep dive material.

https://electionscience.org/

[Rajiv Prabhakar]

Good idea. I've now moved the FAQ to a separate page, in order to keep the home-page more concise and impactful.

Regards,
Rajiv

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