Is voting working? What if we rolled the dice instead?

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Michael J. Smith from Portland, Maine, in the United States writes in the Sun Journal:

Everybody likes democracy — in principle. But apparently fewer and fewer people are happy with the actual thing, if the Pew Research Center is to be believed.

My dear old mom, of blessed memory, used to sigh and say, “If only we could get the money out of politics!” But in a social context where there are relatively few people who have lots of money, and don’t mind spending it on politicians, to promote their interests, this is difficult.

What Mom meant by “politics” — and what we usually mean by “democracy,” too — is in fact electoral politics: the machinery of parties, nominations, polls, advertising and “messaging.” And of course campaign contributions, which is a genteel euphemism for “bribes.”

The spectacle itself is squalid enough: the mendacity of “talking points,” the non-responsive answer to the tendentious question, the rhetorical trickery, the vulgar personal attacks and the hollow, deceptive slogans.

But more to the point, it simply doesn’t deliver what it promises: namely, some approximation to what Rousseau called the “general will.” Our executives and legislatures consistently fail to come up with things that the public wants. Examples abound, but we have an especially glaring one before us just now. Public opinion has turned very strongly against Israel, across the partisan spectrum, but all our politicians, from president to dogcatcher, are basketballs-to-the-wall for the South Africa of the Levant.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Equality by Lot 2025 statistics

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 16th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2025 Visitors Posts Comments
Jan 778 7 28
Feb 708 6 22
Mar 1,249 7 41
Apr 1,639 8 48
May 1,985 7 32
June 1,739 3 13
July 2,232 4 3
Aug 5,550 6 28
Sept 10,673 4 25
Oct 11,760 4 48
Nov 16,893 9 49
Dec (to 27th) 17,363 6 14
Total 72,569 71 351

This year’s number of page views statistics as reported by the WordPress system show very large spikes that probably indicate some sort of automated activity that is not being filtered by the WordPress data gathering. The bar chart produced by the system is completely distorted by these spikes and I therefore do not post it this year. I switched to tabulating “visitors” rather than “page views”, since the former seem somewhat more stable. I am not sure how “visitors” are counted and how reliable the counting is. In any case, comparison with viewership statistics of previous years may not make sense.

Posts were made by 12 authors during 2025. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.) This blog currently has 398 are e-mail subscribers and 152 WordPress subscribers.

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 5th result. Equality-by-Lot is on the bottom of the first page of results (9th link) when searching for “sortition“. (Google no longer provides an estimate of the total number of results for the search terms.) Asking ChatGPT “what are good websites about sortition?” does not return (for me, at least) Equality-by-Lot as one of the recommendations.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: History, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Cockshott and Cottrell: Toward a New Socialism

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2010 and 2011, I wrote a couple of posts on this blog linking to writings by Paul Cockshott about sortition. Cockshott, who is a Marxist economist and a computer scientist, himself followed up in the comments.

I did not know until very recently, however, that Cockshott, together with a collaborator, Allin Cottrell, wrote in 1993 a book called Toward a New Socialism [full text PDF] which makes a case against elections and for the use of allotted bodies in government. While the book focuses mostly on economic planning, chapter 13, “On Democracy”, presents an insightful analysis of the oligarchical nature of electoralism as well as of the problems associated with two standard Marxist alternatives, soviets and communist party dictatorship. The analysis uses the historical cases of Athens and the Soviet revolution and also make mention of Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible? (1985).

Some excerpts:

Chapter 13: On Democracy

Utopian social experiments are strongly associated in the public mind with brutal dictatorships and the suppression of civil liberties. Given our century’s history this is to be expected. Although there is a growing realisation in Britain of a need for constitutional change, visions of what this might involve are modest. Devolution of power to regions and alternative parliamentary electoral systems may be open for discussion, but the supercession of parliamentary democracy itself is almost unthinkable. Our object in this chapter is to think the unthinkable—specifically, to advocate a radically democratic constitution. We outline a modernised version of ancient Greek democracy, and defend such a system as the best political counterpart to socialist economic planning.

Democracy and parliamentarism

It is one of the great ironies of history that election by ballot, for millennia the mark of oligarchy, should now pass as the badge of democracy.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Proposals, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Guerrero in Jacobin

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Alexander Guerrero’s book Lottocracy was published a bit more than a year ago. Guerrero discusses the book in a recent interview in Jacobin magazine. Jacobin has, by the way, offered sortition to its readers at least once before, back in 2018.

Interestingly, Guerrero’s argumentation is much more effective and to the point in the short interview format than it was in the book. While in the book supposed epistemic difficulties of well-meaning elected officials are played up in order to explain why elected government does not promote the general interest, in the interview the principal-agent problem faced by society regarding its decision makers is treated as a self-evident case of a conflict of interests where the agent is simply promoting their own interest at the expense of those of the principal. Applying to electoral systems the same straightforward understanding of the problem that is generally taken for granted when dealing with non-electoral systems makes for a much more convincing and effective argument.

Also interesting is the fact that in the short interview Guerrero finds room to mention Bernard Manin’s important book Principles of representative government, a reference which is sorely and inexplicably missing in Lottocracy. Guerrero now refers to Manin as explaining that elections were set up as a deliberately aristocratic mechanism. This is an important historical point, which (I believe) is also missing in Lottocracy. That said, Manin’s most important idea – his “pure theory of elections” – is still missing in Guerrero’s argumentation. This theory explains why elections must produce elite rule and thus can be expected to promote elite interests at the expense of the general interests, without having to resort to the standard popular ignorance argument which is problematic both as a matter of fact and as a matter of principle.

Finally, the fact that the interview skims quickly over Guerrero’s proposal for how sortition is to be used also benefits the presentation. This brevity leaves the stage for the democratic ideas behind the mechanism of sortition and does not obscure these ideas with Geurrero’s elaborate proposed set-up which aims to prevent the allotted citizens from going democratically “wild”.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Sortition is the only worthwhile democratic option

Posted on November 1, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Octave Larmagnac-Matheron writes in the French magazine Philosophie [Original in French. Below is an English version generated by Google Translate with my touch-ups]:

In one of his characteristically thought-provoking Facebook posts, the philosopher Valentin Husson wrote a few days ago: ‘When the world tips towards illiberal democracies and authoritarianism, political courage would dictate that we propose a radical democracy. The only worthwhile one would be sortition (as with lay juries).’ I readily agree with both the observation and the proposal.

Sortition is, I believe, one of the first political ideas I defended in my short life. I remember quite well how I first arrived at this idea, during a high school lesson on Athenian institutions, which offered an overview of the workings of this unique system where members of the legislative and judicial assemblies — the Boule and the Heliaia — were chosen by lot, using a machine called the kleroterion. I was surprised that we used the same word — democracy — for both this system of chance and our own, elective system. Discovering philosophy two years later, I came to the same conclusion. Aristotle wrote that “it is considered democratic for magistracies to be assigned by lot and oligarchic for them to be elective” (Politics). Centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers wholeheartedly agree. Montesquieu wrote: “Suffrage by lot is in the nature of democracy. Lot is a way of electing that offends no one; it leaves each citizen a reasonable hope of serving their country” (The Spirit of the Laws). Rousseau agreed: “The way of lot is more in the nature of democracy” (The Social Contract).

Intrigued by these short phrases, which didn’t seem to bother many people, I then embarked on further reading. Allow me to mention two works that particularly struck me at the time. First, Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government (1995). The philosopher recounts the rise of an electoral system that conquered the world following the great revolutions and clearly explains the aristocratic character of this regime that usurped the name of democracy. Next came Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), whose impassioned prose undeniably sparked enthusiasm in my young alter ego. Democracy, Rancière emphasizes, is a scandal: “Democracy means first and foremost this: an anarchic ‘government’” — without any claim to distinction — “founded on nothing other than the absence of any right to govern. […] The scandal lies there: a scandal for distinguished people who cannot accept that their birth, their seniority, or their knowledge should have to bow to the law of fate.” Isn’t impartial chance the best option for every citizen to participate in the exercise of political power — a guarantee that this power will not be monopolized?
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Hallam: Sortition is democracy

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, recently released from a year-long stay in jail where he was serving a sentence for criminal political activities, has been a sortition advoacate for some time. Hallam has a new forceful article in The New Stateman (and a new book). Unlike other authors, for Hallam, sortition is not an add-on. It is democracy. If memory serves, Hallam is the most high-profile consistent advocate for sortition to date.

Hallam starts by a full frontal assault on elections.

Voting isn’t democratic. We need sortition

Randomly selecting people to rule would be a hell of a lot better than holding elections

[V]oting and elections do not, and never have, produced rule by the people. What they produce is oligarchy – rule by the few. Don’t take my word for it. This was standard political knowledge from ancient times up to the French Revolution. What you got with voting and elections was a few people in charge – obviously! Because, as everyone who observes what actually happens knows, so-called electoral “democracies” are always controlled by the few. Sure, if you like voting and elections and oligarchies that’s fine. They have their pros and cons, but don’t delude yourself and others that you are a democrat. You are not.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Lenin’s theory of elections

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Yoram Gat

In a short article called “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” published on January 3, 1919, Vladimir Lenin asserts that

[As long as] the bourgeoisie continue to keep the entire apparatus of state power in their hands, [and] a handful of exploiters continue to use the […] state machine[, e]lections held in such circumstances are lauded by the bourgeoisie […] as being “free”, “equal”, “democratic” and “universal”. These words are designed to conceal the truth, to conceal the fact that the means of production and political power remain in the hands of the exploiters, and that therefore real freedom and real equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population, are out of the question.

It seems that for Lenin “the means of political power that remain in the hands exploiters” which render elections undemocratic are primarily the channels of mass communication:

In practice the capitalists, the exploiters, the landowners and the profiteers own 9/10 of the best meeting halls, and 9/10 of the stocks of newsprint, printing presses, etc.. The urban workers and the farm hands and day laborers are, in practice, debarred from democracy by the “sacred right of property” (guarded by the Kautskys and Renners, and now, to our regret, by Friedrich Adler as well) and by the bourgeois state apparatus, that is, bourgeois officials, bourgeois judges, and so on. The present “freedom of assembly and the press” in the “democratic” (bourgeois democratic) German republic is false and hypocritical, because in fact it is freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with venomous lies of the bourgeois press

Thus, it is by manipulating the voters through what would today be called “misinformation” or “disinformation” (or what a few years ago was called “fake news”), that the elites manage to get majorities to vote against their own interests and maintain the situation in which they are controled by the elites. And in general, any electoralist system (whether in a capitalist system, or in a nascent socialist system, which he calls a “dictatorship of the proletariat”) is a system of oppression because the dominant class uses its control of the communication channels to get the voters to support it electorally. Therefore, the dominant class cannot be changed electorally but only by overthrowing the electoral system in one way or another.
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Filed under: Elections, History | 6 Comments »

Cultural Planning by Lottery

Posted on June 14, 2025 by peterstone

Here’s a news item from Arts Professional, which describes itself as the “the UK’s leading independent arts publication for industry professionals.” The article describes how “Emma Harvey of Trinity Community Arts and LaToyah McAllister-Jones of St Pauls Carnival – both based in Bristol – have teamed up with Citizens in Power to create the first citizen-led cultural delivery plan” using a Citizens’ Assembly. I must say, I found this article long on waxing poetic and short on concrete details. And the Athenophile in me was much pained by the description of sortition as a “Roman” practice. Anyway, here’s the link:

https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/feature/citizens-for-culture

Filed under: History, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Handpicking the candidates – a possibility that remains unaddressed

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

The Kleroterion is a sculpture by Taryn Simon. It was originally presented at the Storm King art center in New York in 2024. It is now on display at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Alfred Mac Adam, Professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University, reviews the work at The Brooklyn Rail, a website billing itself as “Critical perspectives on art, politics and Culture. Independent and Free”.

Adam explains the workings of the sculpture:

The machine randomly picked one from a group thus avoiding any possibility for corruption. Simon’s recreation, which looks something like a classic PEZ dispenser as Donald Judd might have reconfigured it, stands alone in one room of the gallery. The space is curtained in red drapery, with red carpet on the flooring forming a pathway to the kleroterion. To run the device, each of five viable candidates for office would be assigned a colored lozenge. The lozenges would be inserted into a slot and a crank turned until all but one lozenge were ejected from the machine, declaring the winner.

As Adam describes things, and indeed, looking at the device itself which has very few slots, Simon’s device is quite different from the Athenian kleroterion. Continue reading →

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Mr. Smarty Pants introduces his readers to sortition

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

It appears that Mr. Smarty Pants Knows is a brief section in The Austin Chronicle which introduces readers to the lesser known words and expressions of the English language. The April 11th, 2025 of edition of this section introduces its readers to the word sortition (among a few other words). The author provides a short rationalization for the mechanism.

Have you ever been selected for jury duty? Sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random to get a representative sample. In ancient Athens, they believed sortition was more democratic than holding elections because oligarchs couldn’t buy their way into office.

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