Keeping the sortition process honest

Sortition is the method used in the plenarchy to select the individuals who make up the nine member citizen-councils running the state authority. The process of sortition is employed to prevent the political class from forming and taking hold of the police and military forces. So in the plenarchy there are no elections, and that means no politicians either. But keeping the process of sortition honest is imperative to maintaining the integrity of the state authority, the Services in the case of a plenarchy.

For the plenarchy, the process of selecting citizen-councilors is to be described in principle and contained in the Compact under the Article of Principles which are not changeable and with mechanical details under the Article of Councils which can be changed by popular referendum. The sortition process is to have the following characteristics contained in the Article of Principles:

• Transparency
• Randomness
• Simple
• Secure
• Held regularly or as needed to fill empty council seats
• Only eligible citizens are included

A more detailed description of the system would be contained under the Article of Councils. One arrangement might be to specify that a dedicated computer should be used in isolation and not connected to a network or the Internet, however, each selection result must be made available to the public and on the Internet. Names of all eligible citizens would be contained in a database pool and this database would be open to inspection and audit. A program would then generate random, say 16 character, alphanumeric keys and assign to each citizen record. New keys would be generated for each run. Next the program would then generate keys randomly until it finds a match among the citizen record keys. This process would repeat until all citizen record keys are matched for the number of citizens to be selected.

There is a risk that a concerted clandestine effort could undermine the system of councilor selection by infiltration of the Fidelis Service, the people administering to the selection process. That the computer programs could become tainted which is why once the program is compiled, a record of the original compiled byte codes should be made public along with the source code. Once the program goes into operation, there should be no further access to it. The only interaction after it starts running would be to update the citizen database records and obtain the result of each run. Minimizing access to the run programs will help to maintain the integrity of the process.

What I’ve described here is one way to perform the selection process. I’m sure other methods could be devised but the most important objectives of this process are to ensure randomness and integrity. That each step must be made available to the public for inspection and with complete transparency. And that the process be simple. If the means of selecting citizen-councilors loses its integrity, then a political class could surreptitiously form unbeknownst to the general population leading to an overall loss of integrity of the Services, so keeping the process honest is a critical goal.

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