Why Sortition
Representative random samples are the most accurate tool we have to get the consensus of the governed
An illustration from Puck Magazine entitled “Dragon Meat” showing “The New Congressman” heading towards a capitol building guarded by a dragon labelled “Special Privilege”
We don’t appear to have a government of, by, and for us. We appear to have a powerful, unaccountable ruling class.
Why is that the case? I want to talk to you about an explanation that questions one of the most fundamental assumptions we have about democracy. What if elections aren’t actually democratic?
That sounds crazy, but how many people you know could stop their working or caregiving responsibilities to run or serve in office? Of those, how many would want to expose themselves and their families to public scrutiny to prove that they’re “the best”? Of that group, who has access to enough money to make themselves known to the public and to be seen as “viable”?
Elections systematically weed out most humble people, working people, and caregivers - and elevate a disproportionate number of sociopaths, narcissists, and people who can make money in their sleep.
Is a government truly of, by, and for the people if only a small and unrepresentative fraction has the opportunity to serve?
This isn’t just to bash on politicians. Some are earnestly fighting for what they believe will be a better world, but we know that, as a group, our politicians don’t do what the American people want.
We the people are not in control, and unfortunately for all of us, the human beings sitting in office aren’t necessarily in control either.
In order to keep their jobs, politicians have to answer to the donor class. The potential funders with the most money have the most influence, so corporations - unconscious amoral collections of profit incentives - end up with the most power. Elections have resulted in us humans being outcompeted for control of our own governments.
Environmental crises, unaffordable housing and healthcare, and unjust taxation, banking, and employment are all consequences of having our political system controlled by entities who disproportionately benefit from those problems.
Clearly, the system we have is not working. So, how do we get a government that actually does what the people want?
Well, when researchers - like Gilens and Page from that study earlier - want to know what people want, they use representative random sampling, because that is the most accurate tool science has come up with for understanding large populations.
But we can do a lot better than off-the-cuff survey opinions. We could use representative random samples to cut out the middlemen and govern ourselves as if we could all be informed, fully participate, and deliberate with each other on every important policy.
Imagine this…
For each major issue, we could take a stratified, random sample of the people large enough to be proportional to the public on things like household wealth, gender, and race, but small enough that they could all talk with each other: maybe 150 people. We would give them the resources and time they needed to come up with the best consensus proposal they could for their issue.
Then we would take their proposal and put it in front of a larger, representative, purely random jury of the people to decide if it was better than the status quo before it was enacted.
We could run these processes at different geographic scales and for different issues simultaneously, including for developing agendas, passing laws, and hiring and firing the executives we need to sort out policy details and get the work done.
That seems like a much more accurate way to get the will of the people than popularity contests among rich partisans.
“Has anything like that ever been tried?”
Yes.
And there’s even a word for it: sortition - having random samples of the people take short turns governing.
In fact, Ancient Athens - where the word “democracy” comes from - used sortition as their primary means of self-government, not direct democracy or elections.
Aristotle is quoted as saying “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are selected by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.”
For thousands of years, sortition was considered to be THE WAY to scale democracy.
“So how did we end up using elections instead?”
It’s all tied up with the history of the United States.
The US founding fathers openly badmouthed democracy and did not consider elections to be democratic. As Thomas Jefferson said, they were attempting to create a “natural aristocracy.”
The founders intended elections to elevate our “betters” to make decisions on our behalf, in the same way elections had been used in the parliaments of monarchies for centuries beforehand.
Over time, as voting rights were expanded to more people and politicians found it useful to invoke the idea of “democracy” to get elected, the United States gradually came to be seen as a “democracy.”
And then our electoral model was copied around the world, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not.
“Okay, but does sortition work?”
Yes!
In fact, the United States has used a simple form of sortition in our juries to make life and death decisions for centuries.
Sortition consistently produces evidence-based governance to achieve stability and general wellbeing, just like we would expect a coherent democracy would.
Because, while it’s inevitable to randomly select some idiots and extremists, it’s also inevitable that those groups will be overruled by the randomly selected majority.
And sortition has some important advantages over elections.
With sortition, our decision-makers don’t owe anything to big corporations, wealthy donors, or political parties.
There is no place for gerrymandering, campaign finance, or career politicians.
Instead of legislatures full of old, partisan, white, wealthy, male businessmen and lawyers - when we use large enough random samples - we get groups of decision makers that look like all of us. All sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, exactly in proportion to the American public.
Sortition is the way to truly get a government of, by, and for the people.
“Shouldn’t experts make the decisions though?”
It makes sense to delegate technical decisions to experts - like delegating flying a plane to a pilot - but the passengers, not the pilot, should decide on the destination.
Besides, politicians aren’t necessarily experts in anything other than campaigning for office. They are, first and foremost, performers.
Just like anyone else, politicians rely on subject matter experts to help them make good TECHNICAL decisions - problems with objectively correct answers.
And, if anything, politicians might be less receptive to new information and less objective in evaluating expertise, because their jobs often depend on them NOT changing their minds.
In the words of Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The task of holding experts accountable seems far better suited to representative random samples of the people equipped with the time, resources, and data to perform thorough, regularly scheduled reviews, than to partisan politicians OR the general electorate, composed of individuals with many competing priorities and little hope of personally deciding the outcome, voting only every few years.
“Won’t randomly selected people be corrupted, just like politicians?”
Elections facilitate corruption by setting up opportunities for ongoing “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationships. Both corruptor and corrupted are incentivized to keep working together because neither knows when the potential for mutually beneficial cooperation will end. Even after politicians leave office, there’s the possibility for future consulting or lobbying jobs.
Individuals on a jury, on the other hand, have no expectation of ongoing mutual benefit, so the corruption must be laid out in clear, transactional terms from the beginning. The juror must be paid enough upfront to act against what they otherwise would AND to make it worth the risk. Larger bribes are harder to hide and every juror who takes one is in danger if even a single juror defects and reports the corruption.
There’s a reason indicted politicians and big corporations often prefer to settle out of court: it is hard to tamper with juries.
We already know how to enforce effective anti-corruption rules for juries, we just need to apply that same knowledge to sortition bodies.
“But I don’t want to give up my vote to randomly selected people!”
You wouldn’t necessarily have to.
Right now the donor class pretty much determines what candidates and ballot initiatives we even get the chance to vote for.
If we want, we could use sortition bodies to write the ballot initiatives or vet the candidates that the rest of us get to vote on. In this way, the range of debate would finally be up to people like us, not just our bosses, our landlords, and big corporations.
Short-term representative random samples of the people are incentivized to delegate future decisions the way they would want if they WEREN'T in power - because, with random selection, that's the position they will soon be in. If a public vote is in most people's best interest, that is what a sortition panel is incentivized to decide.
We don’t need to design a whole new government from scratch or change everything all at once. We just need to change who fundamentally has power over the system.
It’s a huge conflict of interest for politicians to write their own rules.
We should use sortition - representative random samples - the most accurate tool we have - to give us, the governed, the exclusive power to change the foundations of our government and write the rules for our rulers.
“Sortition seems good,” you say, “but it’s so far-fetched.”
Well, let’s work through the most often repeated alternative strategies.
“What if we held elections on Saturdays, required everyone to vote, publicly funded elections, and used Ranked Choice Voting and proportional representation?”
Australia already does all of these things and, while their government may be more functional than ours, they still have significant political problems.
Bernie Sanders often claims that the solution is getting more working-class people to run.
But why don’t you run?
Probably because you have to work.
Maybe because you have kids or elderly family members that rely on you to care for them.
But definitely because you rightly assume that unless you’re a wealthy, well known person that can raise a lot of money, the experience would most likely be an expensive, confrontational, potentially embarrassing, massive waste of your time.
“What if we COMPLETELY publicly funded elections?”
Unless we’re also willing to pay for candidates’ living expenses and dependent care, workers and caregivers still wouldn’t be able to run.
Since we couldn’t afford to have everyone stop working and run for office, how would we decide who to give funding to? If we base it off of popularity or name recognition (both of which can be paid for), we’re right back where we started: rule by the rich.
This also wouldn’t address the problem that elections attract a disproportionate number of people with sociopathic and narcissistic traits while repelling most humble people, those who avoid conflict, and those who like to keep to themselves.
To paraphrase Tolkien: few people are fit to hold power over others and those who are drawn to the opportunity are often the least fit to do so.
“Okay, so elections really are problematic… What if we used direct democracy?”
Assuming we could maintain a perfectly transparent and fair direct democracy system, would you have time to become informed on every single issue? Let’s say you could. As a single vote among millions, would all that work be a good use of your time knowing that you can’t force other people to become as informed as you’ve become? Might your limited time on this earth be better spent helping your family or enjoying the company of the people you love?
This is the problem of rational ignorance and it comes up anytime the work of becoming informed significantly outweighs the benefits. It doesn’t make sense for people to spend a lot of time deeply researching candidates or issues if they have minimal or no influence on the outcome. So they won’t become informed. They will trust their chosen special interest-funded media outlets and influencers to do the work of deciding how to vote for them.
Expecting everyone to become informed and vote on every issue gives disproportionate power to the idle, special interests, and those with the resources to manipulate public opinion.
We need to share the burden of constantly paying attention and being informed - and ensure that the work people put into it makes a real difference.
“What if we only allowed educated people or experts to vote?”
If a test determines whether people get to vote, then the people with the real power are the ones who get to write the test.
The people who have the opportunity and motivation to pass the test don’t necessarily represent everyone who should get a say.
If we believe in democracy, the whole proposition of only allowing experts to vote is backwards. Instead of taking power from the people who should have the information, we can give the people who should have the power the information they need.
“Well, since we can’t inform every single person on every single issue, what if we gave samples of the people the opportunity and motivation to become informed on a single issue and then let them decide that issue?”
That’s sortition.
“Okay! But knowing about sortition won’t do us any good unless there’s a chance to actually make it real.”
There are paths to make this real, but obviously, this kind of change will be extremely difficult to achieve.
That being said, right now we the people are not in charge, and until we fix that fundamental problem we’ll have to keep fighting the same types of uphill battles over and over again. So, we must find a way.
We have been told that we are facing a future of climate-fueled mass migration, conflict, and death where technology will increasingly raise the stakes of war, erode our privacy, and strip away the bargaining power of workers.
Let’s say all of that’s true, who do we want deciding how we navigate those challenges?
Elite donors and politicians who benefit from keeping things as they are?
Privileged revolutionaries willing to cause some collateral damage?
Or “We the People” who must live with the consequences?
If you agree that the governed should rule themselves, we want your help!
Join us at sortitionUSA.org/members.
Spread the word about sortition, in person and online. If everyone realized that elections serve elites, not regular people, and that there is a better alternative, we would be most of the way to our goal.
Read “Democracy Without Politicians” by Terry Bouricius or similar books. Consider reading as a group or buying copies for libraries.
Advocate for the use of sortition in local government or organizations you are a part of so they get input from all types of people, not just those with the most motivation or time. This is a great way to familiarize people with the idea of sortition and to develop the expertise to attempt even more ambitious implementations.
Work to convince activist groups that sortition is the fundamental reform that will make all other worthwhile reforms easier. Politicians are more able to ignore calls for change when activists are divided on what solutions to try and those who benefit from the status quo are united in preventing change. If we collectively demand that decisions be made using sortition, it will increase the likelihood we get beneficial changes, it will give the resulting policies more legitimacy, and it will spread the word about how we should scale democracy.
Join (or help start) a local sortition group. Adapt our model legislation or ballot initiatives for your state. Find candidates willing to make sortition their key issue, or, if you have the opportunity, consider running for office yourself.
Let’s bypass politicians and finally get a government truly of, by, and for the people!
 | A guest post by
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Thanks for writing this. I’ve been on board with sortition for years now. Most people don’t seem to be familiar with the concept and are often skeptical of it when they first learn about it. It will only gain traction if advocates keep talking about it.
I appreciate this article all the more since I now started to prompt (force) AI to work on a plan to take sortition mainstream. To successfully make it a word that everyone can spell and provide the definition. Your excellent well thought-out, deep and detailed analysis covering all the finer points makes the undeniable case that we must find our way to start and implement Sortition at every level of governance.