Beating Gerrymandering... With Coin Flips

David G Schwartz's "Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling" made a comment in passing of how Julius Caesar used to adjudicate trials by flipping a coin. This got me thinking, what would happen if we deliberately introduce chance in the US electoral process....

Now I'm not saying that we simply flip a coin to decide a winner, but something more like this:

The winner of a Federal Congressional District will be chosen by a randomized lottery pick, whereby the proportion of lottery balls is reflected by the voting results

To give a more concrete example, let's say this is the election result:

      Danny Democrat            54%
      Ronnie Republican          44%
      Larry Libertarian            1%
      Gaston Green                1%

The week after all the votes are counted, a lottery is held to decide who will represent this Congressional District. Of the 100 lottery balls, 54 of them will be marked 'D', 44 marked 'R', and 1 each for 'G' and 'L'. And like the NBA draft, whichever ball comes out of the lottery will determine the next Congressperson.

This sounds like an extraneous step, but I can think of some advantages:

a) It Makes Gerrymandering a Moot Point- It's possible for one party to win a majority of the seats by simply dumping the opponent voters all in one Congressional District and win the rest by some small mragin. Under this method, the expected number of seat will always be 50-50, no matter how you cut up the districts.

b) Third Party Candidate Now Has a Snowball of a Chance- If you have 435 Green party candidates who all pull down 1% of the votes, 4 of them will become congresscritter out of sheer dumb luck.

c) Unsettles the Incumbents- Would the K-Street lobbyists throw millions of dollars at any single Congressperson if they know that even the safest Congresperson has a 25% chance of getting tossed out the next cycle? My guess is no.

d) Encourages Voting-Now since you are voting for the probability of winning, you now have an incentive to vote even if your candidate is hopelesslly out of it or up by 50%.

e) Added Excitement About The Election- Imagine election lottery day on EPSN :-)

Of ocurse there are downsides. For example, if this rule applied to the Senatorial elections, Katherine Harris would have a 30% chance of being the next Senator. On the other hand, for every Katherine Harris, there would have been a Harold Ford that got in so that the odds balance out on the whole.