“The best argument against democracy,” Winston Churchill reportedly said, “is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Watching native-born Americans belly flop on a citizenship test suggests Churchill wasn’t far wrong.
But what about a week-long conversation? Worse? Actually, no.
An intriguing model of citizen participation in Oregon suggests that prolonged conversations with voters—or, conversations among voters—can dramatically improve democracy. The model is based on the jury: the panel of disinterested voters, operating under strict rules of procedure, presented with arguments and evidence, and left to apply their judgment to a case.
What an independent, nonpartisan Oregon group called Healthy Democracy has begun doing, with the sanction of state government, is to submit pending ballot measures to quasi-jury trials and then publish the results in the voters’ pamphlet. What’s so intriguing is that Oregon voters are starting to pay special heed to the one-page verdicts of these mock trials. In fact, before long, such juries could hold more sway than millions of dollars in campaign cash.
Oregon’s Citizens’ Initiative Reviews (CIRs) are perhaps the brightest light in the constellation of reforms to the initiative process that I’ve been mapping in this set of articles. And paradoxically, they do nothing to stem the tide of Big Money (after all, SCOTUS won’t let us). Instead, they just aim to make money matter less.
