Thought experiment with elections: My response to Robin Hanson's "National Juries"

Over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson takes on the idea of National Juries (by which elections are decided by a small randomly-selected sample of citizens; in this proposal, 12 voters per district), and wonders why we don't do that.

My response: Wouldn't politicians make large promises to that select group of people? That seems like a recipe for vote-buying and corruption.

Hanson's response (to me): "Obviously we’d forbid new laws targeted specifically and obviously at these jurors."

Hmm. Who would forbid it? The same politicians writing our laws?

A more effective solution might be to expect these promises, and then create incentives for the jurors to avoid those politicians.

For example, if you multiplied the number of selected jurors by 4-5x, but had only 20-25% of the votes “count” (randomly), then each juror would expect to not be selected and therefor not a recipient of said “pork”.

The trick here is to make sure that the identities of the wider pool aren’t known to politicians and aren’t verifiable if they claim publicly to be in the pool; identities of the smaller amount of “chosen” jurors would be made public following the next election cycle.

In other words, by significantly increasing the odds that a juror’s vote could matter, but still keeping that probability well below 50%, you would create adequate incentives for participation while limiting incentives for gamesmanship.

There are would almost certainly be other side effects and unintended consequences from doing something like this, so don't take it as an endorsement. Just an idea.