Lets say we have a hypothetical fool proof and unbiased mechanism by which a random citizen is chosen for the role rather than an election.
They would have no special powers and could like normal be reigned in by congress or parliament should they go whacko.
Would you be interested in such a system? I’d say yes because as I get older seeing the stodgy system shaken up is more important than consistency.
At first I thought you were wondering if I would be interested in being in the pool for President, in which case the answer is no. However, upon reflection, if the alternative is to have some random other dude be President, or myself, then I would regretfully submit my application considering the odds of getting a true dimbulb in the White House.
Theoretically, I like the ‘casting lots’ method of choosing leadership - it’s how my local church congregation chooses its lay leaders (from a pool of vetted candidates).
But randomly selecting a citizen to be president? Have you ever read Youtube comments?
And before someone points it out yes the system takes into account age and ability, if say a coma patient was selected the random selector is run again.
We have a random method now.
The problem with this sort of proces is that there wouldn’t be any real control over who might win. Sure, even if we take it as a given that only a small percentage of people are too incompetent or nuts to effectively execute the office, that’s not a risk worth taking. If you could put some kind of filter in place, like anyone who can provide some sort of minimal qualification like a certain number of signatures to ensure they at least represent some subset of citizens and then randomly select from that list, there might be some virtue to that. It would mean we could potentially get multiple candidates from each major party and several third party candidates. It could still be bad if some nutjob manages to get the requisite support, but I’d think it would be a lot less likely. I’m still not sure if that would make it any better though.