One of my oldest friends spends each fall obsessively playing fantasy football. (It would be more accurate to say he spends each fall “cheating” at fantasy football, but that is a different story).
Here’s how nuts he is: To prepare for our league’s draft next weekend, he has run more than 30 “mock drafts” on web sites that offers fantasy addicts this service.
At his urging, I recently signed up for one of these mock drafts, and immediately found myself thinking about the debates over whether California needs a constitutional convention and how to conduct such a convention.
On the web site I used, there were a half-dozen mock drafts starting every five minutes. I signed up for a draft similar to my own league, with 12 teams. Eleven other people (I have no idea who they were—you could sign up anywhere in the world simply by registering with the web site) also signed up. And then we took turns drafting, remotely over the Internet. There was a time limit of one minute for each pick.
The exercise provided a sense of which players might go in which rounds of the draft of my very own league. When the draft was over, each participant could review the results to see how strong your team was. It was good practice, I must admit. Those who aren’t fantasy football players might not believe it, but literally millions of mock drafts are being run all over the world in advance of the new football season.
Here’s my question: Why couldn’t we do something similar in advance of a constitutional convention?
An Internet site could be set up to allow people to register and participate in the editing of the state constitution. If a few thousand people signed up and participated, the site would randomly divide those registered into groups of, say, 150 (the number of delegates to the last constitutional convention, in 1879). They would then have a set amount of time – say a week – to submit changes to the document, wiki-style. If participants disagreed on particular provisions, each could submit his or her own language, and the group would vote on the best option.
If enough people signed up, the exercise would produce several samples of a rewritten California constitution.
What would be the use of these mock draft constitutions? As a real-life example of what people might produce in a real convention.
Right now, backers of the constitution idea are relying on polling and guesswork to figure out what people might change in the document. It’s another thing entirely to ask people to actually change the document. The Internet allows for trial runs.
Another thing: Backers of the convention idea are debating whether (and, if so how) to limit the topics might be considered. Giving people the chance to do such on-line mock conventions would provide insight into the issues that most concern people. (It also could identify controversial hot buttons that convention backers might want to avoid).
Would anyone actually sign up and actually suggest rewrites to such a long document? Well, you might be surprised how many obsessive people are on the Internet, filling their hours with mock drafts.
Some of them may even be your friends.