Sortition Voting
In October of 2018 I was driving around and listening to my local NPR member station, WAMU (I'm a proud sustaining member!) when I heard a fascinating piece on Sortition Voting.
https://wamu.org/story/18/10/15/brett-hennig-should-we-replace-politicians-with-random-citizens/
The idea is that a random selection of US Citizens would better represent the interests of the country compared to the people who currently win elections.
I was intrigued and wanted to visualize the things that I was hearing on the radio.
I took some publicly available US Census data and built a quick "Random Senator" generator in Excel.
The parameters to this generation were
Below is the visualization. I reached out to Brett Hennig and he really enjoyed the visualization and even put it on his website!
visualization will probably look better in full screen - hit the full screen button in the lower right corner!
https://wamu.org/story/18/10/15/brett-hennig-should-we-replace-politicians-with-random-citizens/
The idea is that a random selection of US Citizens would better represent the interests of the country compared to the people who currently win elections.
I was intrigued and wanted to visualize the things that I was hearing on the radio.
I took some publicly available US Census data and built a quick "Random Senator" generator in Excel.
The parameters to this generation were
- Each seat had a 50% chance to be male or female
- Once the sex was determined each seat generated a random number which then was applied to the census data to determine race and age
- The census data stopped at 85 years old, which explains the plateau at the end of the ages
- This represents who would be selected by a sortition committee, not necessarily who would accept the position.
Below is the visualization. I reached out to Brett Hennig and he really enjoyed the visualization and even put it on his website!
visualization will probably look better in full screen - hit the full screen button in the lower right corner!
