Sortition on TED-Ed

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Yoram Gat

An animated video named “Could lotteries replace elections?” on the popular channel TED-Ed has amassed almost 100,000 views since it was published a few days ago. The video makes many familiar and incoherent arguments for and against “lottocracy”, with Alex Guerrero, Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati mentioned by name.

Toward the end, the video does come surprisingly close to making the fundamental point that democracy should be about building “institutions that serve everyone and address real problems”. (Unsurprisingly, this is immediately followed by a cliché about it being “up to us to keep experimenting until we find a system that achieves those ideals”.)

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Sortition, video | Leave a comment »

International Network of Sortition Advocates presents

Posted on March 23, 2026 by richwbrown

The German Lottocracy Party

Losdemokratie

für eine starke

Bürgerschaft

Translating Sortition from Theory into Political Organization

Join sortition advocate and party co-founder Jochen Krattenmacher as he outlines the strategic reasoning behind the German Lottocracy party and shares early experiences and lessons learned. Jochen will reflect on practical challenges such as: collecting ballot access signatures, communicating a critique of “democracy” as electoral aristocracy on social media, and translating sortition from theory into a political organization.

The talk will also offer insights into the internal life of a political party that aims to make itself obsolete.

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Quinn: The case for sortition

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Kevin Quinn, a member of the United States Marine Corps from Concord, New Hampshire, United States, writes in the Concord Monitor.

Most of us have been selected for jury duty, and for those of you who have not yet had the honor, look forward to it! Jury duty is determined through a process called sortition, which involves the random selection of a group of people to obtain a representative population in a given area. In more diverse populations, sortition allows for fairer trials as there is a lower likelihood of gross overrepresentations of certain populations.

For instance, in a case of elder abuse, if we used a system other than sortition, we might only have either elderly people running, to take up pyres and pitchforks for the alleged abused, or we might only have nursing home workers running, in order to protect those from their creed. Either of these, or a combination of the two, would not actually provide a representative population of the area in which the abuse occurred, and therefore would not give the accused a fair trial.

Some of you may know that our state legislature made national news during the past month. Kristin Noble, who is the Chair of the House Education Policy and Administration committee, had messages leaked where she made suggestions that segregation should find its way back into New Hampshire Schools. This is not the first time that our state legislature has made the news, either. In 2015, Warren Groen, in front of a class of 4th graders, decided to compare the talons of a red-tailed hawk to Planned Parenthood.

The House has also become a cesspool for the “Free State Project” to advance its agenda at a local level. The Free State Project is a group of out-of-state political operatives who have the agenda to turn New Hampshire into a libertarian safe haven. The number of representative seats available in New Hampshire has facilitated the takeover of our government by these out-of-state radicals. As recently as 2021, a closely aligned group rated 150 of our representatives with at least an A-minus grade in terms of alignment with their political agenda.

I am tired of our system being made a mockery of by clowns like Kristin Noble and Warren Groen, and tired of our system being abused by radical groups like the Free State Project. But our current political climate is one of bitter complaints and not one of solutions. For the House, I propose sortition.

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Allocracy: A Word for a Time That Has Come

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Wayne Liebman

“Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery. All I will do is to give a hint or two as to names.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a letter coining the word anesthesia, November 21, 1846

The assembly ended, a few delegates lingered. They’d spent four days deliberating on the Los Angeles City Charter. Real people, chosen by lot, wrestling with real questions about how their city should work. Now they wanted to stay involved. One of them asked, simply: what do you call this? She didn’t just mean the assembly. She meant something larger.

It stopped me cold. We’d just completed the first charter reform assembly in the United States. Los Angeles: four million people, the largest American city ever to host such a body, had given ordinary residents an official voice in rewriting the rules of their own government. A small group of voluteers I’m part of spent years building Public Democracy LA (PDLA) into an organization that could help make something like this happen, educating, organizing, strategizing, advocating, recruiting, training. Then the charter issue dropped in our lap, and RewriteLA, a new coalition, formed to generate momentum for an assembly on charter reform. PDLA ran two charter mini-assemblies (December 2025 and January 2026) and the full assembly followed in February–March. Four days across two weekends, twenty-six hours of deliberation, moderated by Healthy Democracy, with an assist from PDLA. A landmark.

And we still didn’t have a word for it.

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Who speaks for Iran?

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Hanspeter Rosenlechner

An open letter to the Iran diaspora

The Islamic Republic is collapsing. What comes next will be determined not only by what happens inside Iran, but by whether those outside it can demonstrate something the regime never could: the ability to put Iran before themselves.

What is currently visible in the diaspora is not encouraging. Monarchists and republicans, MEK supporters and secular leftists, Kurdish federalists and Persian nationalists — each group convinced of its own mandate, each dismissing the others’ legitimacy. Reza Pahlavi draws on popular acclaim. Maryam Rajavi draws on decades of organization and international recognition. Others draw on ideology, on exile networks, on foreign backing. All claim to represent the Iranian people.

None of them do. Not because their intentions are wrong, but because representation cannot be claimed. It must be demonstrated.

This is precisely where the Arab Spring failed. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria — every transition collapsed not because of the old regime, but because the legitimacy vacuum was filled by competing factions fighting for power, each convinced its mandate was sufficient. The result was not democracy but a new cycle of authoritarianism, civil war, or chaos. Iran faces the same structural danger. And the diaspora’s current fragmentation is not a preview of Iranian democracy. It is a preview of its failure.

There is one question that cuts through every claim to legitimacy: Would you accept an outcome you did not shape?

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Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , | 6 Comments »

In Defence of Trial by Jury

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Editor note: This post has been substantially revised following a note from James Kierstead.

The UK government is aiming to reduce the use of trial juries in the UK, claiming this is useful in order to “modernise the criminal courts” and “save victims from pain and anguish of delays”. Under the proposal “cases with a likely sentence of three years or less heard by a Judge alone – estimated to take 20% less time than a jury trial”.

James Kierstead, who has written before about sortition and its history, writing in spiked, makes several good points regarding juries and the attempt to reduce their purview, highlighting the hypocrisy and manipulation behind the government’s claims.

Labour’s attack on jury trials is an attack on democracy

Justice secretary David Lammy’s plans will take yet more power out of ordinary people’s hands.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend In Defence of Trial by Jury, a panel event co-organised by spiked and the Free Speech Union. The event was a response to UK justice secretary David Lammy’s absurd plans to reduce the number of Crown Court cases that go before juries.

The panel members questioned Lammy’s assumption that jury trials were to blame for the Crown Court’s current backlog of almost 78,000 cases (rather than, say, a lack of funding or the number of spurious claims that now make it to court). And they emphasised the centrality of jury trials to our liberal institutions and to the common law, which has long been a bulwark of liberty in Britain, as in other English-speaking countries.

Yet one thing that struck me about the panellists’ excellent contributions is that they all centred on what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called ‘negative’ liberties – our freedom from coercion by the state – rather than on ‘positive’ liberties – our freedom to participate in decision-making with our fellow citizens. In other words, the contributions had more to say about liberalism than about democracy.

The threat to civil liberties posed by Lammy’s jury-trial plans is not to be underestimated. Especially at a time when Brits can be charged with ‘inciting racial hatred’ for expressing concern about illegal immigration on social media, as was the position of former Royal Marine Jamie Michael last year. Michael, as it happened, was cleared by a jury of his peers after only 17 minutes. It is understandable to wonder what might have happened had a judge from our current legal elite decided the verdict.
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Filed under: Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Review of Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians in The Guardian

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian makes the predictable points. Substance aside, the very fact that an article in a wide circulation newspaper has the subheading

A Yale professor’s radical proposal to replace elected leaders with ordinary people, chosen by lottery

should be seen as a positive development.

The title of the review prefigures the content:

[C]ould we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump?

Clearly we need to get rid of some politicians, but not all of them.

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

Hinsliff likes the feel good stories about “the human benefits of participation”.

The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.

Giving people actual policy making power in serious matters, is, however, clearly, absurd.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 8 Comments »

Kogelmann: Sortition and cognitive ability

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Yoram Gat

In a new paper, Brian Kogelmann stakes an explicitly elitist position against sortition, by arguing quite plainly that the average person is too stupid to hold power.

Sortition and cognitive ability

Abstract: There is a growing sense that representative democracy is in crisis, leading to renewed interest in alternative institutional designs. One popular proposal—what I call legislative sortition—says we should replace elected legislators with randomly selected citizens. While legislative sortition has drawn both numerous supporters and critics, one objection has received little attention: that ordinary citizens’ lower cognitive abilities, relative to elected officials, will diminish the quality of governance. This paper articulates and evaluates this concern, distinguishing between several versions of it. I argue that some forms of the objection are implausibly strong, but that a suitably qualified version can be defended. Although this does not provide a decisive reason to reject legislative sortition, it meaningfully shapes how we should assess its promise.

Legislative sortition faces many objections (Lafont, 2020; Lafont and Urbinati, 2024; Landa and Pevnick, 2021; Umbers, 2021). And yet, I have found no sustained scholarly investigation of what I believe is the most common reaction to it among those who encounter it for the first time. Guerrero describes it:
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | 10 Comments »