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[QUOTE=Silur]This is exactly why we actually have started a party with the purpose of selecting candidates at random from the population. We're running for the 2006 election in Sweden. Its all on voluntary basis though, so we will not be able to market ourselves like the conventional parties do.[/QUOTE]

Fascinating, Silur. I wish you the best, although the fact that someone will be voluteering to run leads immediately to the suspicion that they want the job--and as Vicsun pointed out, anybody who wants the power, shouldn't have it.

As I posted elsewhere recently, that's the basic flaw in democracies. Thomas More, the old reprobate who wanted theological control over a powerful monarchy, was the first one to make this point about democracies and power in his satirical novel, Utopia. It was his assertion that democracies simply can't work efficiently, because too much time is spent by power-obsessed people squabbling over getting into office and dividing the spoils.

[QUOTE=fable]Other. I'm an American, but I'm hardly in the middle between the two bozo parties we've got, and I don't belong to any other.[/QUOTE]

The US right-left political continuum is not the same as the European right-left. It's not a simple question of different place on the same scale, they are not in the same vector. My political stance would be impossible to put on a US scale, although it's quite easy to nail it as European centre politics. Just to take an example: the type of protectionism in trade and tariffs that can be seen in the US, belongs to the extreme left in northern Europe. Religious issues like abortion, teaching religion in school, protecting religious values etc are represented by separate parties, in Scandinavia for instance, all parties expect for the small Christian Democrats Party do not deal with religion at all since it is not part of politics.

[QUOTE=fable]Fascinating, Silur. I wish you the best, although the fact that someone will be voluteering to run leads immediately to the suspicion that they want the job--and as Vicsun pointed out, anybody who wants the power, shouldn't have it.[/QUOTE]

We're aware of this, so most of the time spent since we started conceiving the idea have gone to securing the random process, both from a judicial and a purely executive perspective. For starters, in the candidate selection process there is only one exclusion criteria - all those involved in the process. So in effect, the only people that cannot be selected for office are those in the leadership of the party. Secondly, the process is open to public scrutiny and in difference to Diebold, any source code or principles used in the process are made public. Third, if we do win enough votes to give us seats I think we could attract the interest of independent observers such as Jimmy Carter or equivalent to survey the process.

Since Sweden keeps such good track of its citizens in huge computerized databases, it is possible to make the process "selection first", that is, we select an individual at random from the population first and then ask that individual if he or she is interested in being a representative for four years, 1:8000000 chance of reelection... All other parties are "volunteer first".

But yes, it's tricky keeping those striving for power out... we're currently checking on the legality of a "selfdestruct" clause in the charter, ie "any change of the of the election process goes against the principles of the party and it is thus equivalent of disbandment", etc, yadda, yadda. I'm also sorry to say that we have as yet no working principle for how to apply this in a two-party system so the current US system pretty much excludes this idea. For anyone else who's interested, all documents will be released under GNU public license when they're finished.

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Vote anarchy!