Bagenstos on sortition in the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Election Law Blog writes:

Bagenstos, “Lottocracy as a Protector of Democracy? Sortition, Expertise, and the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission”

Forthcoming article in the Wisconsin Law Review by Sam Bagenstos (Michigan):

A growing body of democratic theory contends that sortition—the selection of decisionmakers by lot rather than election—can strengthen democratic governance, particularly by defending the popular will against subversion by entrenched political insiders. Yet the sortition literature has struggled to answer a persistent objection—that randomly selected citizens lack the expertise to resolve the factually and legally complex questions that modern governance demands, and will therefore either flail or be captured by the very experts on whom they must rely. Advocates too often wave this concern away with slogans (“experts should be on tap, not on top”) or bury it under implausibly elaborate institutional designs.

This essay uses the first redistricting cycle of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) as a case study to examine these questions. Created by a 2018 citizen-initiated constitutional amendment, the MICRC is the most strongly sortition-based redistricting body in the United States. Michigan voters gave it final authority to adopt districting plans—rejecting arguments that an unelected, unaccountable body of “neophytes” could neither be democratic nor competent—precisely to break partisan insiders’ lock on the line-drawing process. Under the amendment, commissioners are selected by a complex process involving three rounds of random draws. The amendment also imposes strict rules disqualifying political insiders from service on the Commission, guaranteeing that the Commission will have funding and independent counsel, and requiring an extraordinary degree of public participation in the map-drawing process. It serves each of the three functions that advocates of sortition have suggested a randomly selected citizen assembly might serve: final decisionmaker, democratic check on elite capture, and generator of public information.

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