Elections are bad for democracy

Every one of these other participants breaks the analogy enough to make it useless.

We've never tried sortition on a large scale, and on smaller scales it's already been shown effective.

A perfect opportunity to experiment with it would be the Canadian senate, IMO.

Also note: sortition is a form of democracy. In fact I would argue it's the most democratic process proposed which does not run a risk of mob rule. You still have an "elite" making decisions... only that elite is constantly changing, is made of a representative sample of the general population, and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups.

It's actually quite beautiful and elegant: so simple, yet it addresses so many of the criticisms of every other system proposed. While at the same time it's incredibly flexible in implementation: it can be perfectly fitted to a parliamentary government structure or any other variation of already existing governments. Any country or state would be able to experiment with it without needing a major overhaul of how its legislative/executive branches operate (only how its members are appointed).

Would it? To pass a measure is to approve a change, so there's always a side that wins if the vote doesn't pass. Opponents of a change could defeat it on the first ballot, and would likely focus effort on doing so, especially if turnout was expected to be small -- because the first vote isn't meaningless, if it fails, the measure is dead, and there is no second vote.

But because of this, supporters of the vote would also work very hard to mobilize support in the first ballot, because succeeding in it would be necessary to get to the second.

But to this day, we don't have democracy in a single country.

Democracy supposes that the people has the power. It's not the case in what we call democracies today.

You have a small group of people getting in the election pool because of where they come from and how much money they can manipulate. Then, this small group takes most of the decisions, which is what we call an oligarchy.

Voting then, is just a way to swap people from this group. In no way it puts power in the hand of the people.

Quite often people opposes dictatures with our systems to justify that if they are in that state, then we are in a democracy. The fact we have a better, and confortable system doesn't make it magically fit the definition.

For the people to have power, you would need them to want it in the first place. But most don't read political programs, most don't think hard about what their country should do, and most certainly don't accept any responsability for anything happening today in their country. They won't choose what they buy or whatch on TV according to the impact on the social life.

Hence, elections are not bad for democracy, it's just we never manage to use them to setup a democracy in the first place.

In fact, to have a democracy we would need to educate people to want it first. To make everyday's decisions by thinking about it. And to think about what society can become on a regular basis.

Right now, as most of us think and act mostly for ourself, we can't achieve democracy. Democracy cannot be brought only by using a fair political system (that we don't even have), you also need citizens.

This isn't anything new. It's the justification for all the bureaucratic layering in government. The people are too stupid/bigoted/whatever to make decisions for themselves, so we'll make it for them.