The deepening failure of California politics has led many to call for a new constitutional convention. Major state groups, leaders and mayors are backing the idea, which will be the focus of a meeting in Sacramento on Oct. 14.

One of the thorniest but most important questions surrounding a convention is deciding how to pick its delegates. One current proposal, which has led to some confusion, is to pick convention delegates the way we do jury panels. In that way, the thinking goes, citizens could escape the influence of special interests and wealth in the convention proceedings.

As explained by Steven Hill in The Bee on Aug. 2, the idea would be to randomly pick five delegates from each Assembly district to reflect the state's demographics and compose a scientifically selected convention of 400 people.

Though Hill celebrates the abilities of the "average Californian," he admits that delegates selected in this way might know little about the state's problems. He proposes they attend a two-month crash course on California, taught by experts.

The plan is simple, quick and at first attractive. But studied closely, it proves to have a number of flaws. The biggest is that in addition to barring the special interests, it would succeed in barring the people themselves from the constitutional process.

It would do this by omitting any role in the convention for all but 400 of the state's 38 million citizens. It would deny us the basic right to pick our own representatives.

The democratic way of picking delegates is to call public meetings in which members of the district meet, talk, argue and pick whoever they think is best suited to represent the district's hopes and concerns at the statewide convocation.

This public approach also would let citizens form local task forces and committees on the state's key problems - water, energy, schools and more. These might keep meeting throughout convention proceedings, working with our representatives and keeping them accountable to local needs.

These district committees might even up set up contacts with task forces and committees from other districts, creating webs of involvement and civic education throughout the state focused around the convention deliberations. Minority communities normally excluded from the political process would have a reason to participate. The convention could give birth to a new politics by its very existence.

The jury method precludes all this. The lucky winners would go off to a special location, learn a new vocabulary and a new view of the issues and objectives. They'd do this in isolation, without input from neighbors or friends.

The plan optimistically puts its trust in the experts, though experts themselves don't always agree. Indeed, they can be completely wrong, as the lead-up to the energy crisis in 2001 or the derivatives fiasco demonstrates.

The underlying flaw in the whole plan is that it confuses political representation with statistical representation.

A democratic representative system produces delegates entrusted to do something on behalf of their constituents. A random jury does not. Its members are not delegates of anyone.

A democratic representative system holds delegates accountable. A jury system does not. A constitutional convention is not a jury or a focus group. It is a convocation of the representatives of "the entire sovereignty of the people" as the League of Woman Voters put it. Ways must be found to check the influence of money and special interests in the district elections. But let's not throw the baby of a new politics out with the bathwater of the old.

If we really respect average Californians, we should let them pick their own representatives to the new constitutional convention.

• A conference on constitutional reform in California will be held Oct. 14 at the Sacramento Convention Center. For details, go to http://igs.berkeley.edu/events/reform2010.html.

Jeff Lustig is a professor of government at California State University, Sacramento. You can reach him at jlustig@igc.org.