The ancients would laugh

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Excerpts from an article on the CBC website.

Athens: Birth of Democracy, a documentary from The Nature of Things, follows host Anthony Morgan as he investigates the origins of democracy in ancient Athens, how it functioned and what this political experiment may have to teach us today.

Standing at the Leokoreion — a recently excavated open-air temple built in the centre of ancient Athens — archaeologist John Camp shows Morgan the exact spot where the spark of the Western world’s first democratic government is believed to have ignited.

Camp, former director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, points to an inscription that reveals it was here, in 514 BC, where one of Athens’s two ruling tyrants, Hipparchus, was assassinated.
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Sortition, video | 3 Comments »

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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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 | 2 Comments »

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 | 10 Comments »

The solution is in plain sight

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Phil Wilson writes in Z about the horrors of electoralism and “the most enormous obstacle to sortition” – the fact that those who claim to be against the horrors cannot bring themselves to consider the democratic alternative.

A Plea for Sortition and Direct Democracy in the Wake of the Epstein Files

The Epstein Files do not warrant shock and horror. A quiet nod of the head along with maybe a lopsided, very restrained smile might suffice. I will consider my most cynical smirk – the one conveying a sort of fatalistic disgust normally employed for train delays, and added charges to my cell phone bill. These redacted millions of pages contain just enough information to let us know two things: 1) the rich pukes who run our lives with godly, bored indifference, have been raping, torturing and maybe sometimes murdering trafficked children, and 2) absolutely nothing will be done about it.

The Epstein Files are not a revelation, but a reminder. Why feign horror when the feral dog shits on the rug? Do some of us accept that capitalism performs epic acts of mass murder and torture, yet blanche in utter disbelief at the sadistic hobbies that elites enjoy in private? Did anyone imagine that Larry Summers and Peter Thiel spent their down time delivering blankets to the nearest tent city?

The Epstein Files shows the public the private face of societal suicide. When psychopaths seize control of governmental and corporate institutions, they gain the cover needed to act out the most predatory sexual fantasies, but that is nothing compared to what corporate and political policy inflicts upon countless millions of victims. If we are horrified at the private evils committed by Epstein’s clients, we ought to be far more distraught over the public crimes of these morally castrated pillars of capitalism – war, colonialism, privatized prisons, privatized hospitals, privatized armies and the unmitigated project of environmental ruin and mass extinction.

We have voted and revoted. The ballot box leads inevitably to Trump. We can’t vote our way out of this. It will take massive resistance – Minneapolis writ across the face of the country. I believe that the goal of resistance ought to be the end of electoral politics, the end of parties, the end of super-PACs, the end of politics as mass spectacle. The biggest challenge involves massive, organized, committed civil disobedience – but that will yield nothing without a vision of renewal.

The solution is in plain sight.

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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

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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Sortition in 2025

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Equality-by-Lot’s traditional yearly review post. For previous editions look up each year’s December posts.

The most important sortition-related development of the year was undoubtedly the decision by YourParty in the UK to allot the delegates to it founding conference. This decision created an intense discussion around sortition, a discussion that was unprecendented certainly in the UK specifically, probably in the entire Anglosphere, and possibly even in the modern world.

Many activists were horrified to find that sortition stripped them of their standard privilege associated with their established organizing and willingness to invest time and resources. The claims that the whole setup was a way for the organizers to control the process were substantiated by the setup’s details: Thousands of allotted delegates gathered into a hall for a two-day event, inevitably forcing them into the position of passive audience, eliminating any possibility of setting the agenda for the conference. Interestingly, one of the decisions adopted was a rather vague commitment to allotting some of the delegates of future YourParty conferences.

Another notable event was the posting on YouTube and TikTok of a “Subway Take” by the Academy Award winning actor Riz Ahmed in which he proposed to “stop having all elections and elect leaders through a random lottery”. On YouTube the post has now been viewed over 2.5 million times and garnered almost 200,000 likes.

Within the standard academic sortition mud stirring, one proposal stood out: using sortition to create democratic investor assemblies for controlling corporations.

Finally, the electoralist crisis in the West continues to unfold. An opposition candidate who unexpectedly won the first round of presidential elections in Romania was disqualified and the leader of the French Right was barred from participating in upcoming elections after being found guilty of illegal management of party finances.

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

Juries for democracy

Posted on December 19, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Sam Wang tells the story of how a grand jury refused to indict a man for assault by sandwich, segues to allotted electoral districting commissions and concludes with the following

Jury-style mechanisms may be one of our best remaining tools for fair governance.

Filed under: Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Bouricius in Jacobin

Posted on December 19, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Coinciding with their interview with Alexander Guerrero, Jacobin magazine has an article by sortition advocate Terry Bouricius. The article’s title is “Sortition Can Help Cure What Ails Our Democracy”. Here is a short excerpt:

The truth is, elections are a trap. Far from a democratic process, they concentrate power in the hands of elites. This was widely understood in past eras; classical and modern political philosophers observed that elections are tools of oligarchy. The liberal theory of consent of the governed, which elections claim to achieve, is about elevating a “special” caste of rulers. That’s the opposite of self-government. And when you consider the cost of campaigns in time and money, the idea that most working people can run for office — let alone win — is a joke.

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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 »

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