Keith Garrett is the sixth candidate for Parliament here in Cambridge, but you’ve probably never heard of him. He stands for the Rebooting Democracy party, a new and largely unknown political faction. I caught up with him to ask what it’s all about, and what might encourage Cambridge students to vote for this new party.

“Currently we elect a set of middlemen,” he says to me. Not being one of those 'middlemen', there’s a quaver and a hesitation to his voice that isn’t present with the other five candidates. “There are other ways of possibly running a country.”

Garrett is not a Cambridge University graduate, instead having studied at Manchester and the Open University, but he has lived in the city for 15 years and captains the '99 Rowing Club, which he founded. Professionally, his CV lists him as a "Unix/Linux System Administrator" who deals with "heterogeneous networks" as part of his career.

In that respect, then, his party platform seems to be the golden dream of a sysadmin and technocratic wonk. Rebooting Democracy’s big idea is ‘sortition’, based on the system used in Ancient Athens and refined by the academic Manuel Arriaga. Instead of electing politicians, panels of citizens would be randomly selected, then disbanded after making a decision, like juries.

“We're looking at deliberative democracy, which is basing it round groups of citizens' panels, getting in experts, working on evidence-based policy, using the electorate's democratic voice to set the direction of the country through randomly selected groups of citizens' panels.”

This is a huge change, but the idea has won praise from across the political spectrum, usually from radicals, professional voices in the House of Lords, or from academics. Even Russell Brand has read out excerpts of Arriaga’s manifesto, ‘Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics’, on his popular web series The Trews. Why is such a big change needed?

“Government doesn't really represent most people in the country. Most people are quite disillusioned with the whole thing,” he says. A pleading note enters his voice.

“A lot of MPs do great work, but a lot of them are career politicians […] The incentives are wrong for governing the country, it's geared towards keeping the machine going.”

That’s all very well, but if our decision-makers do a bad job, we do have the ultimate sanction: kicking them out in a free and fair election. Since Rebooting Democracy’s idea of sortition would, eventually, replace Parliament, won’t this do great damage to accountability?

Garrett anticipates the question. “Currently we have a notion of accountability, that we ought to hold our MPs to account. We don't. At the election at the moment, they're not looking at the record of any of these politicians over the last five years. They're not looking at, you know, who's taking us to war, who's trying to sell off half the country, they're not looking at the big issues, they're essentially looking at celebrities who turn up on TV or who's turned up at my door and said X or Y.”

But isn’t that our fault? There’s a pause. “I think it's pretty much everyone's fault,” he says slowly. “I think the system creates that. You also are expecting quite a lot for everyone in the country to analyse these issues over all these different parties when we've got, quite frankly, other things to do. … I want an overall goal for the country - an equal society, a planet we can live on - and then we should have a government that puts them in place.”

So why bother with a party, rather than just a pressure group? To be blunt, Garrett’s chances at tomorrow’s general election are vanishingly slim: he could very easily lose his deposit altogether, by failing to garner 5% of Cambridge’s highly split vote.

“We've seen the experience of pressure groups in government,” he tells me grimly. “A pressure group that says, ‘We want to remove you and everyone you know from power,’ is going to fall mostly on deaf ears.”

Well, he’s right about that, at least, but how is he going to persuade people to vote for a party promising enormous constitutional change at a time of economic malaise and extreme international geopolitical tension?

Yet he remains optimistic, even about the chances of getting his deposit back. “When I talk to people, they don't really need a lot of persuading. They just say, well, that seems like a much better way of doing things. When you present them with five parties that are all just doing  the same thing though with different opinions about it and then presenting a different way that's a lot fairer, a lot more democratic, people say ‘Yes, that is a good idea.’

“So many people are so disillusioned with the system. I've been so disillusioned for my entire life, seeing us flicking between two different parties and taking the country in different directions each time without any discussion, without any evidence, based on ideology. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We need to figure out where we're going and work towards it.”

That’s all well and good, but Rebooting Democracy’s radical take on popular sovereignty is such a major departure from the current system that it seems unimaginable. They fully admit it’s a long-term plan, and their website talks about expanding their candidate list at the next election. The problem with rebooting democracy, though, is that it’s relatively easy to turn it off; the hard part is turning it back on again.