We Can Govern Ourselves
We do not need politicians to do it for us

Jury Democracy is a new system of democracy where we put each bill or proposal on trial before a jury of 400 or more citizens, randomly selected from the registered voter list. Both supporters and opponents of the bill will be given time to present their evidence and arguments. To pass a bill into law will require a 55% majority vote of the jurors.

Thus, we will make decisions of government based on evidence and reason and talking with each other, instead of based on money and influence and screaming at each other.

Hugh McTavish. He introduced it in his run for Governor of Minnesota as an independent in 2022.

Hugh is a Ph.D. biochemist and patent attorney and is the inventor on over 20 U.S. patents. He invented a natural treatment that improves the immune system and thereby reduces cold sore outbreaks by 60%, which is available for purchase here. He also invented a new family of targeted cancer drugs with improved efficacy and lower side effects that has been effective in clinical trials at the Mayo Clinic.

He is the author of Ending War in Our Lifetime: A Concrete Realistic Plan; COVID Lockdown Insanity: The COVID Deaths It Prevented, the Depression and Suicides It Caused, What We Should Have Done, and What We Could Do Now to Address Real Crises; and the forthcoming A Spiritual Seeker's Abridged Bible with the Gnostic Scriptures.

• All proposed legislation is subjected to a hearing before a citizen jury of 400 or more citizens, randomly invited from the registered voter list, with service voluntary.

• Both supporters and opponents are given adequate time to present their evidence and arguments for or against the proposal, just like both sides get to present their arguments and evidence in a civil or criminal trial.

• A 55% majority vote of the Citizen Jury is required to pass any bill. The Citizen Jury vote is by secret ballot. 55% is outside of the ±5% margin of error for a group of 400, meaning that with a 55% vote we can be 95% sure that if we could have had everyone serve on the jury, it would have had majority support. Requiring a 55% majority to pass legislation also provides a bias toward the status quo, provides stability so that legislation is not flipped when the other party takes control of government and so that people can plan on the law staying the same for awhile, and insures that we have a reasonable consensus for changes in policy instead of 51% imposing their will on 49%.

• The elected legislature (or congress or city council) would also have to pass the bill by majority vote, as in the current system, for it to become law. But importantly if a bill passes the citizen jury, it must receive a recorded up or down vote in the legislature. The legislature cannot just table it and hide. If they want to oppose the express, informed, will of the people, they have to go on record about it.

• Bills and proposals could first go the Jury and then if they pass go to the elected legislature, or they could begin in the legislature and then go to the Jury.

• Every elected legislator (or congressperson or city council member), whether in the majority party or minority party, will have the right to introduce at least one bill directly to the Jury. We want supposedly wacky far right ideas and far left ideas that the current elites would love to bury and ignore to get a hearing. Many of those supposedly wacky ideas would pass. Proposals could also be introduced to the Jury also by citizen petition with a reasonable number of signatures. Because every elected legislator, whether in the majority or minority party, can introduce a bill to the Jury, it will hardly matter which party is in the majority.

For budgets under Jury Democracy, each legislator or congressperson would vote for one

budget, and the top two vote getters would be submitted to a Jury to choose between. With our two-party system, in effect you would have a Democratic budget proposal and a Republican budget proposal submitted to a Jury. The two sides would present their evidence and arguments for both budgets. The Jury would then vote between them and the budget that receives more votes from the Jury would become law without further action by the legislature or executive (president, governor, or mayor).

Budgets have to be passed. Governments have to spend money to do anything and they have to

tax or borrow to raise that money. But the last time the federal government passed its budget on time was 1996! With this Jury Democracy system, a budget would always be passed on time. And both parties would quickly learn what the people want and move their budget proposals closer to what the people want so we get better and better budgets that more closely align with what the people want.

The two parties cannot agree with each other on a budget, but within each party they can come

up with a budget. So we will get two proposed budgets on time. Then we hold a hearing and the Jury picks and voila, we have an enacted budget on time!

Because every level of government has to pass a budget, it is not a good idea to require 55%

approval of the budget. What happens then if it does not pass? And what does it mean to ask a jury "Is this budget good enough?" What is "good enough"? Is this proposed budget perfect? No, nothing's perfect. But "Do you prefer budget 1 or budget 2?" is a clear, binary choice.

​ 400 is the minimum number to be a statistically valid representation of the entire population—meaning there is a 95% probability that a poll of 400 people will give a result within ±5% of the result you would get if you could poll the entire population.

Primarily so that we do not have 51% imposing their will on 49% and we have a reasonable consensus before we change the law or enact new laws.

Also, with a 55% majority required to pass legislation, we will have stability in legislation and

people and businesses can plan for the future. In order to repeal that new law, you would basically have to have 10% of the population change their mind from support to opposition. That is not going to happen soon. One of the big problems we have with our current government is that rules and laws

change drastically every 4 years when a new party comes into power and quickly tries to repeal

everything the previous party did and impose their own agenda. When that happens there is no

predictability. No one knows what the law is at any moment. And businesses cannot make smart

investment decisions on whether to build a multi-million dollar factory to produce a new widget when they don't know whether their widget will be outlawed in 4 years or whether there will be a tariff on foreign competition or steep tariff on their inputs they buy from a foreign source.

Lastly, the margin of error with a group of 400 is ±5%, meaning that if you do a poll of 400

randomly selected people from a population of about 10,000 or more, the there is a 95% chance that

the percentage answering yes to a yes/no question in that group of 400 is within 5% of the percentage you would get if you could have asked the question of everyone. So if we have 55% support for a new law, we can be 95% certain that it would have at least majority support in the entire population.