Let’s End Elections: The Case for the Powerball Presidency

Let’s end elections. For good. The presidential primary season has begun with, well, torpor. The campaigning is excruciatingly early, the positions reliably hackneyed, and the lobbyists’ money flows like cheap beer at a fraternity party. The system is stagnant, and ordinary Americans, especially younger ones, are disenchanted. So like Jonathan Swift, I have a modest proposal.

Imagine an American family seated together around the television on the first Tuesday of November watching — wait for it! — the selection — of the President of the United States of America. That’s no typo. What if we picked the President by lottery? Surely no one would object to exchanging a new dystopia for our current one.

It’s an old canard: that every American child could grow up to be President. Plucked from obscurity, the President-Select would represent the physical embodiment of the American experiment: that all men — and women — are created equal.

Having a President-Select would undercut the special interests who today’s elected politicians seem so eager to criticize — even as, as duplicitously as ever, they solicit their support. The presidential candidates, according to OpenSecrets.org, have already raised more than $420 million. This cycle, by some estimates, the presidency will cost a billion dollars; that’s nearly 167 million meatloaf lunches at Des Moines’ Drake Diner, a popular campaign stop. The statistic makes the primary-season photo ops in Iowa and New Hampshire’s greasy spoons seem like a cruel pastiche.

Yet a selected president who didn’t have to run for anything would not be beholden to anybody. Selecting — rather than electing — the president would also encourage civic participation, foster a sense of citizenship, and forge a purer democracy.

Here’s how the selection of the president would work: just as men over 18 are still required by law to register for the military draft, men and women over 35 would have to register with the National Presidential Selection Board. They’d all be put into a computer system, and an algorithm would randomly select, say, 500 names. In the order they were selected, they’d be put into consideration. The Selection Board would determine if they were citizens, if they had been born in this country, and if they had committed any crimes. They would be put through basic physical and psychological exams and take a basic competence test. If the first person selected met these criteria, she — and, demographically, it would most likely be a she — would begin the process of becoming the Next President of the United States.

The idea is not without precedent: in classical Athens, most public magistracies eventually moved from being elected positions to being selected by lot. To the Athenians, lottery was inherently more democratic than election. For them, elections suggested the utterly un-democratic idea that the “best” people make the best decisions. Picking officials by lot would produce officials more representative of the people — officials who hadn’t come from the best families and gone to the best schools. Today, absent the military draft, jury trials serve as the last vestiges of compulsory public service for average citizens. Picking officials by lot is not that radical of an idea.

Yet when a teacher once suggested presidential selection to a lecture hall of more than 300 Cornellians, the incredulity was overpowering. Once the laughter subsided, the fear set in. America’s best and brightest started asking questions. Questions like, “What if an idiot was made president?” and, “Why am I studying this stuff at $40,000 a year if just anybody could, you know, get picked?” The self-avowedly liberal group of students was in an elitist, anti-democratic frenzy.

I can’t understand why they were so worried, because even if the American people did decide to select the president by lottery, they would not allow someone to just waltz into the Oval Office and start playing with the nuclear codes. No, sir.

From Selection Day to Inauguration Day, the President-Select would take a crash course. As in the golden-age classic Queen for a Day, or modern iterations like Extreme Makeover and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, image, speech, and — purely as an afterthought — civics consultants would swoop down upon the President-Select. This crack team of political and legislative professionals would refine the salt of the heartland into material suitable for the national arena and the global stage. Lose your Chicago Bears jersey for this fall’s latest from Brooks Brothers! Better yet, mix things up with your very own Ahmadinejad jacket! The possibilities are endless.

Making over the President-Select, I think, would be one of the most important parts of the system. After all, you know, not just anybody can be president.

David Wittenberg ’09 is a Senior Editor at The Sun. He can be contacted at dwittenberg@cornellsun.com [1]. The Scoop appears alternate Thursdays.