Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 1)

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Ian Troesoyer, a sortition activist, has recently been a guest on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast, where he had an hour long conversation with the host, Scott Bennett. Both participants in the conversation are unapologetic supports of sortition and the presentation of the idea is very good. For those who are either completely or fairly unfamiliar with the idea of sortition, it is a good resource for hearing it discussed and examined.

As I did with one of Troesoyer’s posts on his substack, I’ll go over some points that I believe can be improved in the argumentation. Again, I am offering this as constructive criticism. I pick up the points in the chronological order in which they appear in the video, and since this turns out to be a bit long, it is posted in installments.

1. Stratified sampling (mentioned at 0:02:30 and again at 0:27:20). This is not dwelled upon in the conversation, but the mere mention of stratification is problematic. It may be that some like the the jargon because it gives the discussion a scientific ring. But the use of jargon introduces a suspicion that something untoward is at hand. In the case of the standard current sortitionist practice – what goes under the name of “citizen assemblies” – such a suspicion would be completely justified. In current practice, what is being called “stratified sampling” is a method to cover for the fact that as the process is currently arranged, a large majority of people refuse to take up offered seats. In order to try and obscure this inconvenient fact, and in order to obscure the fact that, as can be expected, refusal rates are correlated with various obvious social characteristics, the body’s makeup is adjusted in various ways so that certain statistical characteristics of the body match those of the population (e.g., the body is set up so that 50% of the members of the body are be men and 50% are women, even if more women refused to take up seats than man did). This makes the resulting body’s make up appear superficially as if it was created by sampling where no rejection of offered seats occured.
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