DISCUSSION AND VOTING
Once all the panelists have been selected and all proposed bills identifled, panelists would receive summaries of each bill and statements from their authors about the bills' signiflcance. After a period of weeks to consider these statements on their own, panelists would come to Washington, D.C., to deliberate jointly upon the bills. Each bill would have an author (or author-appointed stand-in) who would argue for its signiflcance for flfteen minutes, and panelists would have the chance to ask questions of the witness for an additional flfteen minutes. In two days, citizens would have had the chance to review all of the bills before them, and they would then begin to deliberate on the bills in roughly twenty small groups, with twenty panelists in each one.
Just as jurors and the participants in random sample forums have a clear purpose or "charge" for their deliberations, so would the priority panelists. Their goal would be to select ten pieces of legislation using these three criteria: breadth, clarity, and signiflcance. The citizens would seek to assemble a set of ten bills that addressed different policy issues so that voters could later learn about the views of their representatives (and other candidates) on a range of important national issues. The panel would also choose clearer bills over others to permit straightforward interpretation of votes on issues. This criterion might exclude some bills that include too many unrelated provisions, and it would lead citizens to choose bills voted upon by both the House and Senate over earlier versions so that voters can look at the official votes of both representatives and senators. Finally, the signiflcance criterion would recommend the inclusion of complicated but powerful bills, and it might lead panelists to include multiple influential bills on a single issue that happened to receive sustained attention during a particular session of Congress.[19]
Working with these criteria, the priority panel would deliberate for two days on the different pieces of legislation. Small group deliberations would take place in a room spacious enough to accommodate a large group seated at desks in a circle only one row deep, like a discussion circle in a typical college classroom. That arrangement is important because
When the citizen panelists moved from discussion to voting, the four hundred citizens would come together to vote in three phases. First, to simplify matters, citizens would go through the bills and quickly decide, one bill at a time, whether each bill was a candidate for further consideration. Any bill receiving less than a one-third vote would be rejected. (If fewer than flfteen bills received one-third of the votes, the flfteen with the most votes would remain under consideration. If more than twenty bills remained, those with the fewest votes would be dismissed.) Second, a panelist could identify any pair or cluster of remaining bills that he or she thought addressed the same issue. If a majority agreed to select one bill from the cluster, then each panelist would name his or her preferred bill and the top vote-winner would remain for consideration. Third, after reducing some bills through this process, the citizen panelists would individually rank the ten bills they found most important, and the ten with the highest average ranking would be used in subsequent deliberations.[21] Though somewhat complicated, this process makes the final rankings more meaningful by removing clutter and redundancy before requiring final ratings. If it was found to be too cumbersome or confusing to citizen panelists, they could simply rank the bills after their deliberations without any preliminary votes.[22]
These votes, as well as all other votes taken by citizen panels, would be conducted using secret ballots. Deliberations themselves would need to be public, lest they appear secretive and undemocratic. Keeping the votes secret, however, would take some pressure off of citizens shy of taking public stands, and it would reduce the potential for lobbyist influence. Even if citizens were somewhat sequestered during their deliberations, any creative lobbyist or special-interest organization would be able to reach citizens before or during their deliberations. Such groups might manage to influence what some citizens think about issues, and that is a natural part of the larger process of political debate. If votes are taken in public, those same groups might be able to tie votes to tangible rewards; secret votes make it impossible for a group to know whether any particular panelist voted in its favor (except in the case of unanimous votes against the group's position).
In any case, at the end of their deliberation period, the citizen panelists would break into ten groups of forty. Each of these groups would have one bill assigned to it, and the groups would write brief summaries