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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Filed under: Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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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