Every year, a lottery-selected group of everyday citizens takes up one important policy question. They study it deeply, hearing from the public, civil servants, and experts of all stripes. After detailed deliberations, they craft a polished bill, which is guaranteed a fair hearing.
The SCALE model is motivated by the need for healthier civic life in America. We don't need to cleave into tribal parties and spend exorbitant amounts on campaigns to get better policy. In fact, we need a way out of that trap. Our design centers these needs and principles:
Our process uses (and re-uses) three core citizen-powered process ingredients, each with its own strengths. Civic assemblies are best for representative deliberation, open forums for participation, and ballot measures for voter authority.
Selected by democratic lotteries, these jury-like bodies will think, feel, reason, and act like their state as a whole: rural and urban, east to west, all parties, all walks of life. Participation is a big commitment, so all attendees are compensated for their time and can receive support with travel, accessibility, and childcare. The assembly studies the challenge before it, considering broad input from the public, experts, and civil servants. Then they deliberate and reach decisions together.
Online or in-person — everyone can share ideas, concerns, and proposals. People who want to go deep can join a study group at a local library. Others can weigh in from a keyboard — upvoting, commenting, suggesting alternatives.
The voting public decides. Unlike standard ballot initiatives, where private interests buy signatures and leave voters confused, every measure produced by this system will have undergone extensive deliberation by a highly representative body. Written by the people, for the people.
Open forums let everyone take part but are seldom representative. Ballot measures give everyone a vote but often emerge from private interests with minimal public deliberation. Civic assemblies offer excellent representation and deliberation but can't include everyone directly. The SCALE model integrates all three, capturing their strengths and addressing their weaknesses.
Our process combines the ingredients above in ways that highlight the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of each: forum ideas get serious attention, assemblies have formal proposal power, and the ballot measures that voters consider emerge from deep public scrutiny.
One assembly meets to frame process rules to ensure independence and hone healthy democratic procedures. A second assembly determines the topic question that the policy assembly will work to answer, considering topics suggested in an open forum.
Process and agenda decisions, though almost always decided by organizers, should be under citizen control and free from undue influence.
An open forum invites topic input. Participants deeply study it and then solicit testimony from people with relevant experience and diverse perspectives. They work through the hard issues, weighing options not for hours or days, but for over four months. They integrate feedback from a forum inviting citizens to review their proposals. They work closely with legislative lawyers drafting the policy and consult iteratively with government officials to ensure a robust implementation path. They produce a citizens' bill.
Thoughtful, refined legislation requires time and resources; most civic assemblies get too little of both.
The proposal goes to the legislature for an up-or-down vote. No amendments, no buried-in-committee. If the bill is not passed by the deadline, it goes directly to voters on the next statewide ballot, bypassing signature requirements.
Most civic assemblies are advisory; politicians are free to ignore them. These bills have teeth — if politicians ignore them, the voters decide.
Who gets to decide whether things are working and whether the structure should continue and/or change? The people again.
After four years, a Review Assembly will be convened to evaluate the program. They will assess the earlier cycles and recommend changes. For example, they might advise continuing as-is, expanding to handle more topics per year, or sunsetting future cycles. Their recommendation automatically appears on the next general election ballot for voters to consider.
SCALE is built to embrace the strengths of each “ingredient” process while addressing its weaknesses.
| SCALE model | Public forums | Ballot measures | Civic assemblies | Elected legislatures | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open participation | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Deliberation | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ||
| Representation | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ||
| Authority | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Iterative improvement | ✓ | ||||
| Partisanship | ✓ |
✓ yes ~ some
You may ask, “won’t special interests find a way in?” That's exactly the right question. Every structural choice in this model was made with that threat in mind.
Here's how we prevent capture:
A separate, lottery-selected Rules Assembly designs the process each year — how participants are chosen, how the assembly runs, how disputes are resolved. They are explicitly prohibited from considering likely policy outcomes. No politician sets the rules.
A separate Topic Selection Assembly chooses the policy question from public nominations — asking only: what issue is most important to people's lives and least addressed? They cannot consider likely outcomes. No organized interest chooses what gets deliberated.
Assembly members are prohibited from accepting anything of value from anyone with a stake in the outcome. Attempts to influence members outside the official process are a violation. Outreach channels are controlled by the assembly, not by outside interests.
All proceedings, testimony, deliberations, and votes are public and recorded. The selection process is open-source and auditable. There are no back rooms. Everything is on the record.
The system itself is reviewed at 4-year intervals by a citizen panel — not the legislature. If something isn't working, citizens can fix it. If politicians try to weaken the process through legislation, the review assembly can flag it and the people can correct it.
No safeguard is perfect. But a process that distributes authority across multiple independently-selected citizen panels — with everything public and auditable — is far harder to capture than a single government commission or a legislature that answers to donors.
Answers to common questions about the model.
Fifteen states can put this model on the ballot.
What works, what doesn't, what's missing..?
We're developing the model and building a founding community. Get updates as the effort develops.
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