African wild dogs, you may know, make decisions by sneezing — the principal question always being when to depart. Dominant pack members can get everyone up and moving with only a few sneezes. But the powerful can be overruled, or made to get going, by lesser dogs if they can drum up a greater number of sneezes from the broader population.
Homing pigeons, whose good reputation depends on keen navigation and timely arrivals, will follow the leader as long as it doesn’t get lost. But at the first hint of a wrong turn, the leader is relegated to the ranks.
When honeybees need a new home, they put it to a vote, relying on evidence presented by scout bees whose job is to search for new digs. The scouts present their findings with ritual dancing, gradually building coalitions around preferred choices with repeat visits, open houses, and the like, until the choice is made. The queen is packed up, and off they will go.
The choice of a new queen is slightly less democratic, although it is left to the worker bees to select a slate of larvae as candidates. The nominated larvae are then fed royal jelly. The first to emerge is the winning queen, who will generally proceed to sting the helpless competition to death before they can emerge to present a challenge.
Elephants and orcas are dedicated advocates of meritocracy. The senior female leads. Who better to rely on than the one who has been at your side from the beginning, the one who, in a drought, or when confronting danger, or setting out on a migration, has been there and done that for you? Mom and grandma. They’ve seen it all. And they love you.
For chimpanzees — pretty smart — constant togetherness is just so wild-dog-like. If two or three chimps feel the need to go one way, they go. If others prefer another, why not? It’s a free jungle. Dominant male chimps can’t rely exclusively on muscle to get to the top; they have to kiss plenty of babies on the way (really).
Enter the ancient Athenians, who decided on a system called sortition, wherein the majority of civic leaders were chosen at random by lottery to put a stop to the influence of wealth and power (and muscle) in the democratic process, and the kissing of so many babies.
Unfortunately, the Macedonians put a stop to Athenian democracy. Sometime later, however, the Venetians developed an elaborate, 10-step sortition process for electing their head of state, known as the Doge of Venice (not to be confused with the DOGE of our recent experience). Here’s how that worked: a boy was pressed into service to draw 30 ballots at random from among the Great Council (the ruling elite of the city-state, as many as a thousand of them at times). Those 30 were whittled to nine by a second drawing. The nine were sent back to the well to nominate 40 members of the Great Council. Those 40 were then reduced to 12 by drawing. Those nominated 25 from the council. Those were reduced to nine. After 10 rounds of this, the process resulted in 41 electors, scrubbed of factional interference, tasked with selecting the Doge.
So, for instance, take all the members of Congress, put them in a box, shake the hell out of it (you know you want to), ask a middle-schooler to pull 30 names. Ask another child (any will do) to draw nine from among the 30, get the nine to select 40 more from Congress. Put those names in a box. Shake ‘em up. Draw again. Keep going until the scent of every backroom deal has been lost. Let the resulting list of “electors” pick the president.
To save money and aggravation, I believe this system could be adapted down to the local select board level, relying on a pool of candidates drawn from every person of voting age.
All in favor, sneeze.
Jarvis Coffin writes fiction and essays on rural life. He is a retired media and advertising sales executive and former chef/owner, with his wife, of New Hampshire’s oldest inn, the Hancock Inn. Reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and keep up with all his musings at jarviscoffin.com.