To my comrades engaged in the struggle for a more just world, let me attempt to convince you that underneath the existential problems of capitalism is a deeper problem. A problem that has ironically been shared by all the electoral “democracies” of the West as well as all the major communist and socialist governments that have existed.

The fundamental problem isn’t capitalism, it’s aristocracy: the idea that distinguished individuals - those with supposedly greater knowledge, moral standing, legitimacy, etc. - should make the decisions on behalf of the rest of us.

Aristocracy is the underlying philosophy for both elections and vanguard parties.

Now, you might be saying, “elections aren’t intended to just let distinguished people make the decisions, we pick politicians based on their ability to represent the will of the people!”

Or you might be saying, “Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc. weren’t just doing whatever they wanted, they were acting on behalf of the people!”

Here’s the thing: pretty much all aristocracies say they’re “doing the will of the people.” Kings and dictators say they’re doing the will of the people.

Don’t watch the mouth, watch the hands.

The key distinction between a democracy and an aristocracy is who gets the final say: common people or distinguished people?

Those are the original definitions. It’s all right there in the etymology of the words themselves.

Let me back up.

I spend a lot of time talking to people about sortition: randomly selecting groups of regular people to make government decisions.

It sounds crazy at first, but imagine we were scientists tasked with answering the following question: “what would the people decide on x issue if they could all fully participate, become informed, and deliberate towards consensus together?” There is no question that we would use representative random samples to find out. Representative random sampling is the most empirically validated, accurate method we have to represent large populations. So shouldn’t that make sortition the default method to operate a government of, by, and for the people?

Sortition would drastically increase the political power of working people - since they make up the majority of society - so it was a shock to me to discover that there is a significant group of communists and socialists who react poorly to the idea.

Some of them say that elections will work just fine under socialism: it’s capitalism that causes elections to elevate the distinguished.

Some say it’s pointless trying to change the government until you change the economic system.

Some say that common people cannot be trusted at this time because they are just too incompetent, brainwashed, racist, transphobic, etc. and therefore we need a vanguard party to pave the way.

Hear me out as I attempt to address your objections.

We have a world to win, and I believe sortition is how we win it. Let’s find a path through the conjuncture together.

Why Elections Will Never Empower Common People

Elections consistently elevate the privileged because in groups where everyone does not know everyone else, it requires privilege - of one type or another - to be known and preferred by enough people to win an election. The fundamental problem with elections is that the experiential knowledge and policy preferences of people in privileged positions in society don’t accurately reflect those of the population as a whole.

The US founding fathers famously bad-mouthed democracy and did not consider elections - which they incorporated heavily into their system of government - to be democratic.

The founders borrowed the idea of elections from the parliaments of Europe, where they had been used for centuries beforehand to facilitate negotiations between the monarch and the most influential merchants and landlords.

Thomas Jefferson - often considered one of the most “democratic” US founding fathers - explicitly stated that his goal was to create a “natural aristocracy.” His “Democratic-Republican Party” was actually just known as the “Republican Party” during his lifetime. The founders claimed that it was in the best interest of everyone - including women, slaves, and the poor - for the natural aristocrats (people like the founders) to be in charge.

Over time, as politicians found it useful to invoke the idea of “democracy” to win the votes of recently enfranchised common people, elections came to be misunderstood as democratic. But prior to the 1800s, elections were explicitly understood to be aristocratic. Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Rousseau all have quotes where they indicate that if you want an aristocracy, you should use elections and if you want a democracy, you should use sortition.

In a bitter irony, electoral aristocracy was spread around the world as “democracy,” while sortition was forgotten for nearly 200 years. It wasn’t until 1956 that sortition was seriously brought back into public discourse by the black socialist and historian CLR James in his essay ‘Every Cook Can Govern.’

James’s essay was in response to Lenin’s statement that, “We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.” As a Trinidadian descendent of slaves familiar with the paternalistic excuses for colonialism, James rejected the idea that empowerment should only come after being deemed worthy. James believed empowerment should come first and that all people expected to follow the rules should have an equal say in making them. James’s former wife noted that he chose the title “Every Cook Can Govern” with intentional awareness that women did most of the cooking. James recognized that sortition could empower all people to rule in turns within a context where they could realize their capacity to rule wisely.

Subsequent socialist thinkers played key roles developing theoretical approaches to sortition including John Burnheim in ‘Is Democracy Possible?’ (1985), and Cockshott and Cottrell in ‘Towards a New Socialism’ (1993).

The only decision elections permit common people to make is which distinguished people - in other words, aristocrats - will make decisions for them. Elections appear to be based on political equality because we all get a formally equal say about which elite campaign finalist will make decisions on our behalf, but - critically - we don’t get an equal opportunity to actually make political decisions ourselves. All other things being equal, people with greater privilege have a greater chance of winning elections, so the range of policies available for us to pick from is limited to the preferences of the most privileged members of society.

Wherever and whenever they have been used, elections have given power to the privileged, not the common people. The rarity of exceptions to this tendency proves the rule. This effect can be observed all around the world. It can be observed in US presidential elections and high school presidential elections. It was the case prior to capitalism and it has been the case since.

This is why quasi-socialist programs in electoral countries - such as social security, the NHS, etc. - all tend to erode and enshittify over time. Elections empower the privileged to make the decisions. Privileged people generally don’t need welfare programs and would rather spend the money elsewhere. Thus the hard won social programs put in place to appease mass movements are gradually rolled back by the privileged politicians who benefit the least from them.

Let’s take this analysis one step further. The reason the injustices of capitalism have not been ended by elections is because elections disproportionately elevate those who benefit the MOST from capitalism to make all the decisions.

After capitalism ends - as all things eventually must - if elections remain, they will sow the seeds of the next ruling class. Electoral delegate assemblies and workers’ councils would be full of the articulate, confident, and socially dominant.

Why We Must Change the Government to Change the Economic System

Marx said that, “changes in the economic foundation (i.e. capitalism) lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure (i.e. the government).” Statements like this have been used to argue that in order to address societal injustice, we should focus on economic organizing rather than changing the government (i.e. attempting to codify sortition).

The interrelation between economic systems and governments is complex and not unidirectional but, eventually, the government must change before the economic system will, because property rights are managed and codified by governments (the institutions that govern people, territory, resources, etc.).

If the locally dominant governing institutions don’t acknowledge capital asset claims (i.e. to land, corporations, stocks, patents, copyright, etc.), those claims fall apart. Without the coercive powers of governments, anyone claiming capital assets would have no one to defend those assets except for themselves. And without the ability to recruit third parties to defend capital assets, it wouldn’t really be capitalism.

The power to govern human societies seems to come from: 1. the number of people that can be induced to cooperate or comply, 2. the technology those people can deploy, and 3. how those resources are put together strategically.

Sometimes there is a mismatch between the actual power to govern and what is written down, but changing what is written down matters because large governing institutions need codification to coordinate all the activity necessary to maintain their power.

In 1086 William the Conqueror codified feudalism across the United Kingdom with the Domesday Book and the Oath of Sarum.

Capitalism was codified piece by piece, in Parliament and the courts, during the Enclosure Movement.

During the Enclosure Movement, landlords in the United Kingdom enclosed what had previously been common lands in order to raise wool and other commodities to sell on international markets. The peasants fought back and the landlords - despite all their economic power - had to codify the new property relations through the government in order to benefit from the coercive powers of the state.

Changing the government - specifically changing the codified rules about property rights and who gets the final say - is a historical necessity for changing the economic systems of large societies.

Why Aristocracy Produces Scarcity and Starvation under both Capitalism AND Communism

Another consequence of the Enclosure Movement - in addition to the creation of capitalism - was the Irish Great Famine.

Between 1845 and 1852 over 1 million Irish people starved to death after a disease affecting potato plants destroyed one of Ireland’s most important food staples. The reason that so many Irish people died is because the Enclosure Movement had already pushed them to the precipice of starvation. By the time the potato blight hit, Irish commoners were already scraping by on the absolute worst farmland because they had all been kicked off their ancestral lands a few generations before.

During the Famine, Ireland exported more than enough food for everyone. And although some Irish people eventually benefitted from the international trade the Enclosure Movement helped to establish, that was little consolation to those who had to watch their children starve eating mud. The only beneficiaries at the time were the capitalist landlords. In other words, the political ruling class. In other words, the aristocrats.

This has striking parallels to the Great Famine of China.

Between 1959 and 1961 around 40 million Chinese people starved to death under the communist leadership of Mao Zedong in one of the single deadliest man-made catastrophes in history (for comparison about 11 million people died in the Holocaust).

One of the primary causes of this famine was the crop quotas local officials were required to send to the central government to be sold on the international markets in exchange for weapons and industrial supplies.

During the Great Famine, China exported more than enough food for everyone. And although some Chinese people eventually benefitted from the industrialization that the Great Leap Forward contributed to, that was - again - little consolation to those who had to watch their children starve eating mud. The only beneficiaries at the time were the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, the political ruling class. In other words, the aristocrats.

Aristocracy is a governing philosophy that enables fallible individual humans to use the government (the ‘means of coordination’ if you like) to direct flows of vital resources away from the rest of us in pursuit of their own preferences. This happens under both capitalism and communism.

Why Aristocracy Worsens Public Decision-making, Regardless of the Economic System

Invariably, those who claim to believe that the distinguished people should make all the decisions count themselves among the distinguished.

Everyone’s always an idiot except for them, yet they lack the self awareness to recognize they aren’t the only ones who take this mutually exclusive position.

I don’t know who still needs to hear this, but elites don’t have our best interests at heart.

Just like everyone else, elites have self-interest. Additionally, it is estimated that people in high profile positions are four times more likely to be psychopathic than people in the general population.

And it does not seem like the class character of organizations can provide immunity to predatory individuals: take Cesar Chavez as a recent, high-profile example.

We can’t expect people “better” than us to remain ALIGNED with us. The tendencies for people to self-deal and to dehumanize those who are seen as inferior to them are too predictable and too strong.

Those tendencies don’t just exist under capitalism: take, for example, the 2 million victims of the Cambodian genocide led by the communist aristocrat Pol Pot.

Aristocrats are dangerous and we don’t need them.

To be clear, this is not an argument against expertise. We DO need experts, but aristocrats - including politicians and revolutionary leaders - aren’t necessarily experts in anything other than maintaining power.

Unlike with aristocrats, we can hear what experts have to say without needing to GIVE them the final say.

Experts can explain why they should be trusted over those who disagree with them, but ultimately, the people in power pick which experts to trust. It can’t be experts all the way down.

So, yes, who is in power does matter.

But, ironically, the logic of aristocracy - rule by the distinguished or the “best” - interferes with obtaining sound expertise. Aristocrats can’t meaningfully change their mind, because their right to make the final decisions is based on them already being correct on all the central issues, and this is the case for both elected politicians and the leaders of vanguard parties.

This systemic arrogance kills people.

Aristocratic arrogance contributed to famines in multiple communist countries (including China) after ideologically blinded communist aristocrats adopted the agricultural ideas of Trofim Lysenko - a pseudoscientist who rejected Mendelian genetics and contended that plants of the same “class” never compete with one another.

And aristocratic arrogance is contributing to existential climate change because capitalist electoral “democracies” keep insisting that our global response should center on profitable, market-based strategies. According to a 2025 report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (the professional organization of UK insurance adjusters), the consequences of having our governments controlled by aristocrats - many of whom compete for the right to rule by vying for the support of those who benefit most from climate change - might include the death of 4 billion people, nearly half of us alive today. That is one hundred times the death toll of China’s Great Famine.

Why We Must Demand Sortition

A real democracy - a government truly of, by, and for the common people - would never have tolerated an economic system that works for so few of us for so long.

The reason the injustices of capitalism persist is because you and I have never seen a real democracy.

We’ve seen better and worse aristocracies in disguise.

Perhaps at one time it might have been reasonable to believe that there were elites out there who knew everything and could speak for all of us.

But we know better now.

No one knows everything.

The only group that cares about the wellbeing of all of us, is all of us.

But no human under the capitalist global economic system - or probably any possible global economic system - has the time and attention to deliberate towards consensus with every other person on every single issue that affects them. So, unless we are willing to go back to living in small tribes - and make ourselves vulnerable to any groups willing to build larger civilizations - we have to use a scaling mechanism. And representative random sampling - sortition - is the most accurate method we have devised for approximating those conditions.

The next time a crisis or a mass movement gives us, the common people, an opportunity to change the system, we should demand to be put in charge for once.

Aristocracy is a dead end, whether we are talking about elections or vanguard parties.

Sortition is our path forward.

If you would like to help us move forward along that path, we would be honored to have your help at sortitionusa.org/members

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Terry Bouricius is a former legislator and election reform policy analyst who advocates for replacing elections with sortition: short-term, representative random samples of everyday people, empowered to bypass politicians and decide political issues themselves after cross-examining experts and deliberating together.

You can download Terry’s landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/

To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/

To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

Terry Bouricius is a former legislator and election reform policy analyst who advocates for replacing elections with sortition: short-term, representative random samples of everyday people, empowered to bypass politicians and decide political issues themselves after cross-examining experts and deliberating together.

You can download Terry’s landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/

To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/

To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

Terry Bouricius is a former legislator and election reform policy analyst who advocates for replacing elections with sortition: short-term, representative random samples of everyday people, empowered to bypass politicians and decide political issues themselves after cross-examining experts and deliberating together.

You can download Terry’s landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/

To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/

To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

Terry Bouricius is a former legislator and election reform policy analyst who advocates for replacing elections with sortition: short-term, representative random samples of everyday people, empowered to bypass politicians and decide political issues themselves after cross-examining experts and deliberating together.

You can download Terry’s landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/

To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/

To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

Terry Bouricius is a former legislator and election reform policy analyst who advocates for replacing elections with sortition: short-term, representative random samples of everyday people, empowered to bypass politicians and decide political issues themselves after cross-examining experts and deliberating together.

You can download Terry’s landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/

To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/

To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

Terry Bouricius is a former legislator and election reform policy analyst who advocates for replacing elections with sortition: short-term, representative random samples of everyday people, empowered to bypass politicians and decide political issues themselves after cross-examining experts and deliberating together.

You can download Terry’s landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/

To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/

To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

You can download Terry’s landmark book, Democracy Without Politicians for free at https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org/

To contact Terry, get updates on him, or review his other works, check out https://terrybouricius.com/

To join the sortition movement in the United States, become a member at https://sortitionusa.org/members

Democracy comes from the root words demos, meaning “the people” or “common people” and kratos, meaning “rule” or “power.” What does it really mean for the people to rule, to exercise power? To exercise power is to make your will manifest upon the world. To instantiate those changes you wish to see in material reality. That definition becomes tricky when describing a population rather than an individual. Even insofar as “collective will” exists, populations—especially large ones--are often of multiple collective minds. Thus, the individuals and factions within a population must harmonize, must coordinate, by some mechanism in order to exercise power. At present, the dominant high-level mechanism employed is the election of representatives to serve as coordinators. I believe this model is flawed and not particularly good at harmonizing the wills of the populace and translating that will into material effects.

The root of the issues with elections is the problem of Rational Ignorance. Rational ignorance arises in any situation where the cost of being well-informed is greater than the benefit of being so. When it comes to elections and ballot measures, this is usually the case. Even in a relatively small polity where 20,000 votes are cast, every individual’s influence is already quite dilute. Why would someone spend many hours deeply studying policy issues just to cast a single vote? Even if one takes the initiative to mobilize their social network to vote based on this accrued knowledge, we’re still talking about a few dozen votes. And that’s for medium-size town level politics. When the scale is in the millions of votes, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to outsource their understanding of the complexities of politics to others and remain personally ignorant.

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As a result of this rational ignorance, the majority of voters are uninformed about most issues. Only when an issue rises to a high level of salience does a large fraction of the populace actually start to become informed. This is usually the point when a significant portion of media sources are covering the issue from multiple angles and the issue is salient enough that at least a large minority are exposed to multiple perspectives on the issue. Prior to this point, even when an issue reaches a moderate degree of salience, voters are often exposed only to whichever perspective their own media filter bubble feeds to them, and thus are not truly informed. In practice, those who control the flow of information wield a huge amount of power. In effect, the ignorant masses of voters unknowingly delegate their power to these influential figures and institutions.

But what is that power to begin with? What form does it take? The root of a state’s power is of course its monopoly on violence within its borders, but that root is highly abstracted in modern systems. Long gone are the days of lords directly paying soldiers and staff out of their personal coffers. The administrative bureaucracy is merely the body of the government, the institutions that deal with the day-to-day of running things. Real power is held by those who tell the administrative bureaucracy what to do (or not do), those who decide who should be the ones to do it, and those who check to make sure it was really done. Power is this head of the government, which controls the administrative body.

To put it more formally, I am referring to the power to set agendas (issue directives to administrators, set deliberation rules for legislators, etc.), the power to veto, the power to make hire and fire, and the power to audit. This is not an exhaustive list of the levers of rule, but it covers most of the bases. If a system is to be called “democratic” then the public must wield at least some of these powers to a substantial degree.

So, does the public have the power to set agendas? Certainly not at the federal level. However, in some states, the public does have the power to place ballot measures up for vote. In those states, the public has at least a degree of formal agenda-setting power. Elsewhere, the public has only informal power—the power to complain. What about veto power? Ballot measures do offer the public the power to void laws passed by the legislatures, though the mechanism is not easily applied. Further, the power to recall elected officials also can serve as an indirect form of veto, a feature which 19 states have. In states without these mechanisms, the public’s veto power is limited to the ability to vote out incumbents during the next election. Ok, what about audit power? In theory, the power of referendum can be used to audit the administrative bureaucracy. In reality, this has only happened once in the history of the US, in 2022 in Massachusetts, and this auditing authority was quickly undermined by the legislature. In practice, the public does not have any meaningful power of audit in any state.

Finally, let’s turn to the power to hire and fire. This is supposed to be where elections shine. We the people don’t have direct power, but at least we can choose who does have that power. Unfortunately, elections are a very blunt staffing tool. Elected officials fill a tiny slice of the org chart of government. The overwhelming bulk of staffing decisions in the administrative bureaucracy are not even made by officials directly appointed by elected politicians, but by employees of the bureaucracy. Regardless of what staffing decisions elected politicians might make though, it’s often difficult to hold them accountable. Even when there’s a scandal, unless there is direct evidence of wrongdoing, politicians seldom have difficulty washing their hands of the misbehavior of their underlings. Assuming misbehavior even rises to the point of scandal. Simple laziness or incompetence are usually overlooked entirely, thanks to our friend Rational Ignorance. Further, without the ability to remove elected officials outside of specified intervals, the public’s ability to fire is severely limited.

The definition of democracy I have given is vague, yes. Democracy is a nebulous concept, and it is hard to draw a line where democracy begins. It is true that in a system with freedom of expression and free and fair elections, the public does wield substantial influence over the state. How much influence is enough to count as “rule?” That’s unclear, but I suspect if you polled Americans on whether they feel the people “rule” in America, the result would not be as high as one should expect in a “democracy.”

OK, so the US federal government isn’t very democratic. On some level we knew this. This is what it means to be a constitutional republic rather than a democracy. And besides, look at California. They have recall elections and the ability to pass statutes and constitutional amendments by referendum, and they still have deep, systemic issues with governance. Maybe democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; maybe it’s good to be a republic. Yet Rational Ignorance rears its head again. Yes, Californians have more access to the critical levers of rule, in that they have some access rather than none at all, but what is access without the coordination to use it effectively? If the masses aren’t coordinated, then the well-coordinated special interests will dominate through ad campaigns, aggressive canvassing, bloc voting, and other time-tested methods. Coordination in the public interest exists of course (some percentage of non-profits really are benevolent and effective), but it is constantly struggling for funds and labor.

Coordination is the problem that republicanism is meant to solve. Coordinating large numbers of people is hard, so populations elect someone to represent them. The small group of a few hundred representatives coordinate amongst themselves to find compromise on uses of the levers of power that are suitable to their constituents.

This worked well enough, for a time, but civilization grew bigger and more complex, technology advanced, and the players of the political game got better at playing it. Most of what politicians actually do is coordinate—they gather information, use it to inform their deal-making, then synthesize the deals and information into instructions for the administrative bureaucracy to follow. The problem is that these coordinators often end up coordinating on behalf of themselves rather than on behalf of the public, and use their insider knowledge to enrich themselves and stay in power. They gerrymander, build political machines, engage in patronage schemes, you name it.

Even when politicians are honest, the rules of politics still stand, and the most coordinated parties tend to win. Media institutions, big corporations, unions, zealous religious minorities—any group that can deliver large numbers of votes reliably punches way above their weight politically. These groups then extract favors from elected officials that the less coordinated cannot. Now enter for-profit misinformation, disinformation campaigns by hostile foreign governments, social media filter bubbles, and AI-powered propaganda. The flaws already present in the system become gaping wounds. In republics all over the world, populist parties are surging because politicians are no longer able to adequately reconcile the conflicting preferences of their stakeholders. It’s the job of politicians to align the administrative bureaucracy with the public interest, and they are increasingly failing.

Let’s turn back to democracy. Its Greek origin word, demokratia is believed to have originated in the early 5th century BCE, in Athens. The political system described was one based on sortition—the selection of representatives by lottery—not elections. It was commonly understood that elections were an oligarchic system of government in ancient Athens, and they were rightly viewed with suspicion. Elections were still used at times, as were plebiscites, but most power was controlled by sortition. Magistrates were appointed by lot, and the Boule, a council of 500 randomly selected citizens, set the agenda for what could be voted on by the broader public at the Assembly. Selecting a subsample of the public serves to ease the burden of coordination and does so in way that better aligns incentives than elections do.

Convening a randomly selected mini-public, usually called a “citizens’ assembly,” solves the problem of Rational Ignorance. Instead of being diluted to one in tens of thousands, each person actually has tangible influence over the deliberations of the assembly. Elections are typically dominated by individuals from elite backgrounds, and winning them confers additional elite status, regardless of background. Therefore, elected officials are often insulated from the consequences of their policy decisions. Not so for randomly selected delegates. They must live with the consequences of their decisions, and therefore have skin in the game.

Citizens’ assemblies are also difficult to corrupt, influence, or tamper with. Would-be bribers have no way of predicting who might be selected, and would face the difficult task of figuring out which delegates to bribe without getting caught. Jury tampering was once a problem in the US, but it has not been for a long time now, as it does not require very much state capacity to enforce anti-bribery laws.

Modern assemblies are also designed with optimized deliberation processes, meant to maximize productivity, truth-seeking, and consensus formation. Assemblies often have moderators to maintain order, but are mostly self-guided in how they present information, hold discussions, and otherwise carry out their procedure. Because of such processes, and the fact that they are typically selected using stratified sampling to ensure demographic representation (which the Athenians also did), assemblies also break the filter bubble effect. Delegates are chosen from all different walks of life, people who likely wouldn’t interact much in their day-to-day social circles. Influence campaigns and algorithmic boosting may be good at getting people to vote a certain way, but their effects are broken against face-to-face discussion between fellow citizens.

Finally, sortition processes are easy to audit and secure. Juries are randomly selected every day in America, the bureaucratic infrastructure is already in place. Ensuring the process is not tampered with is a relatively simple task compared to the complexity required to secure elections. Elections may be relatively secure in the modern day, but American history is rife with ballot stuffing, vote buying, and other election fraud schemes. Still, today many Americans are concerned about election security. Liberals often dismiss these fears as baseless fearmongering by the Trumpists, and maybe they are, but voter fraud is hardly without precedent in America.

Some polities have begun to take notice of these benefits. Ireland has now used citizens’ assemblies to write the text of referendums for amending the constitution several times. The amendments legalizing abortion, gay marriage, and repealing the blasphemy laws were all written by assemblies. Belgium has a permanent assembly to represent the interests of its German-speaking minority. Paris now has a permanent assembly as well, whose efforts have yielded significant praise. Even its critics on the city council have voted for nearly all its suggestions. There have been a few assemblies at the local and county level in the United States as well, particularly in Oregon and Colorado. Assemblies are not the only way to incorporate sortition into government though. Michigan’s redistricting commission is made up of randomly selected voters, stratified by political affiliation. Georgia uses grand juries to elect and oversee the boards of equalization in all its counties, as well as the ethics boards of a few counties. New York City recently started using sortition-based participatory budgeting to allocate funds for public services.

Remember the levers of rule from earlier: agenda setting, veto, audit, and staffing. The job of rulers is to manage the administrative bureaucracy of the state, which includes the process of legislation.

Appointment juries could oversee the hiring of high level officials such as judges, prosecutors, legislative aides, executive heads of administrative agencies, etc. Currently such officials are either appointed by an elected executive, which is subject to collusion and partisanship, or they are elected directly, which is subject to voter ignorance and again, partisanship. Juries mitigate the problems of both of the current models, giving a representative sample of the public direct authority over the officials who govern them.

Citizens’ assemblies might guide legislation with the help of professional legislative aides. In the United States Congress today, legislative aide is seen as a stepping stone job. Most are in their late 20s to early 30s, and earn mid five-figures in salary. Few have domain expertise on the subjects they are legislating on. Professional legislative aides, seasoned legal and domain experts accountable to oversight juries, would work with the assemblies to turn their deliberated agendas into bills and laws. Bills created in such a manner could then be subject to a variety of checks, such as veto by elected executive, approval by referendum, or ratification by a freshly selected citizens’ assembly.

Audits of the administrative bureaucracy could be another use for assemblies. Right now we rely on elected politicians to decide who to audit and when, and who not to audit and when not to. This responsibility could be put directly into the hands of citizens’ assemblies, or assigned to professional auditors appointed by oversight juries. At the national level today, the operations of the various federal administrative agencies are typically major issues in most presidential elections. Nominations are often the subject of public attention, but it is the norm for many such positions to be handed out based on political horse trading rather than expertise or alignment with the public interest. Surely few would argue that the current system is meritocratic at the high level. Civil service regulations passed over the years have done much to professionalize the federal bureaucracy, and overall it is far more meritocratic and functional than in the past. Now the Trump administration is threatening those rules however. That said, those rules also often serve to protect bureaucrats from warranted public scrutiny. The administrative bureaucracy makes mistakes and exercises poor judgement with regularity, but their operations are too complex to be subject to effective oversight by the public at large via the ballot. Sortition could be the solution we’ve been looking for to administrative misalignment.

The assembly process itself would have to be subject to oversight as well of course, to ensure the moderators or procedure are not introducing undue bias. Perhaps voters would be asked to elect an Assembly Auditor General to oversee assemblies, or perhaps special audit juries would be convened according to different rules to avoid the same biases as standard assemblies. Sortition and elections could be combined too. For example, perhaps to choose an executive, the public votes for candidates using approval voting, and then an assembly chooses from among all candidates with over 50% approval.

The possibility space for incorporating sortition into government is vast. There are organizations out there today hoping to fix our broken political system with ranked choice voting or campaign finance reform, but when we look to other countries that already have optimized voting systems and strict campaign finance rules, we see most of the same problems. Short-sighted politicians, populist demagogues, and falling trust in institutions. Why waste energy on reforms that clearly don’t work? If republicanism is dying, I say let it. Maybe the solution to our problem of “democratic” backsliding is, well, democracy.

An illustration from Puck Magazine entitled “A Snowball in Hell - What Chance Has It Got?” depicting a large face-shaped snowball labeled “The Public,” dripping money as it melts, while devils carry off the cash and coins to Wall Street.

The goal of “winning” for me is maximizing the chances of survival and minimizing coercion for the people I love. In ‘Why Democracy’ I argued that in order to maximize the number of people who get that outcome (and thereby maximize the chances that I get that outcome), we should…

• Attempt to include all people who wish to use the same natural opportunities within the same government.

• Give all people who must follow the rules an equal say in making them.

• Govern with the greatest consensus possible.

• Use the most accurate system available to determine what the people would decide if we could all fully participate, become informed, and deliberate with each other.

The most accurate system I am aware of for approximating large populations is representative random sampling. Therefore, I think “winning” looks like a global, inclusive, consensus-seeking, sortition-based democracy - a geodemarchy.

I don’t think we’re going to get there without a plan.

This is mine.

Please think it over, critique it, and then get back to me about how we can make it all happen.

I don’t want to be right as much as I want to be working on the right solution, ideally with as many other people as possible.

My approach is to work through existing governments to get constitutions under the exclusive control of the people via sortition, focusing our efforts where individuals - not money or power - have the most leverage, and then to build a global sortition federation from there.

If that sounds good to you, you can skip to “The US Strategy” halfway through this essay. If you’re unconvinced or curious, read on.

Why work within existing governments?

I sympathize with people who think that electoral politics is a dead-end. After all, why do you think I support sortition?! However, I believe sortition is a fundamentally different type of reform which gives it a unique chance to overcome the challenges of electoral politics.

Two-thirds of Americans say democracy is the best form of government, but only about one in four (24%) believe it is working well.

To begin convincing those people, starting with nothing but our shared belief that the governed should rule themselves, we need only ask, “what is the most accurate way to determine what the governed want?”

It’s not even a matter of opinion: representative random samples are the most accurate, empirically validated method we have to approximate populations.

Yes, it will be difficult. Yes, we have a long way to go. But people are waking up to the reality that they don’t live in democracies. We just need to point out why and then mobilize them to help us finish the fight for a government TRULY of, by, and for the people.

Why the focus on constitutions?

The only place “the consent of the governed” or “democracy” really counts is the constitution.

At the level of constitutions, anything is possible.

At every subservient level of the law, one must first deal with whether an idea is constitutional.

Until constitutions EXCLUSIVELY and ACCURATELY reflect the consensus of the governed, we don’t have democracy.

We must not leave constitutions up to something as chaotic or corrupt, for example, as 9 lifelong partisan political appointees arguing over the interpretation of a centuries-old piece of paper.

Why expect sortition to give us a global democracy when electoralism has not?

I think most people want effective, fair global governance of our oceans, atmosphere, and earth. The trouble is that elections assign political legitimacy based on competitive power struggles, not on accurately reflecting the consensus of the governed, and this creates two major barriers to global democracy.

First, because any advantage can help in the competition for leadership, groups that can disproportionately benefit from environmental externalities hold a disproportionate amount of political power in electoral nations. This makes those nations less likely to fairly or effectively govern the use of the environment.

Second, in electoral nations, policy is inherently unstable. Rulers know that the government might swing significantly out of their favor unless their coalition remains in control, so they are incentivized against voluntarily transferring power, including from national to global scales.

Without another world war or some other serious global crisis, which we might not survive, I don’t think nations as they are will give us a global government, let alone one we would want. And while violence or catastrophe might force the creation of a global government, if that’s how it comes about, it probably won’t be a democracy (for example, consider the UN Security Council). Military secrecy and bitterness aren’t super conducive to the transparency and trust required for people to cooperatively rule themselves.

First, I think we will need a few nations to start basing their political legitimacy on democratic accuracy by embracing sortition. These nations can then put out a good-faith proposal for a global democracy that the rest of us can join.

And here we reach a fork in the road.

It is up to each of us to try to reach that first critical milestone: a nation whose constitution exclusively and regularly uses the best sortition processes available to accurately approximate the consensus of the governed.

The US Strategy

We will almost certainly need more movement building in the US before we are in a position to rewrite our constitution around democratic accuracy using sortition. But we must not fool ourselves into believing that anything less than that will be sufficient.

I think the shortest path to a sortition-based constitution in the US is to use the unfairness of the US election system against itself, working within the partisan primaries for state legislative seats.

Article V of the US Constitution states that if 2/3 of state legislatures ask for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one to propose changes to the Constitution. Those proposals would then need to be approved by 3/4 of the states in order to be incorporated into the Constitution.

Calling an Article V Convention has never been done and there’s a lot of uncertainty about how one would work. That’s a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity: we can use the state legislation calling for a convention to define the process, using a carefully considered, sortition-based design. This won’t be easy, but it is a concrete way forward.

Unlike the more familiar congressional amendment process, the convention approach only requires us to demand action from state legislators, who are closer to the people and easier to unseat than members of Congress. In addition, because Article V gives every state legislature an equal say in calling a constitutional convention, people don’t need to go to DC or a swing state to participate in direct, meaningful national action. They can stay right where they are, working in their own communities.

Thanks to gerrymandering, more than 80% of state legislative seats are determined in the primaries.

In fact, because of how uncompetitive most state legislative races are, about ⅓ of the time no one even bothers to run against the dominant party candidate.

But despite how important state legislative primaries are, only about 20% of voters participate in them!

By focusing our efforts on the dominant party’s primaries in each district, we can elect enough state legislators to call a sortition-based constitutional convention with a relatively small number of people.

And, as it turns out, there is already a large, disgruntled, politically motivated group of people that might be willing to help us: the voters who participate in the LOSING party primaries!

Let’s take Idaho, my home state, as an example.

The people who vote in the Idaho Democratic Party primaries have essentially no hope of influencing state-wide elections.

In Idaho, we have had a Republican Governor, Idaho Senate majority, Idaho House majority, US Senate delegation, US House delegation, and Presidential electoral vote every election since 1995, with only one exception: the single term US Representative Walt Minnick in 2009-2010.

Despite that, there are a surprising number of people who participate in the Idaho Democratic Primaries.

In the 2020 presidential primary, 108,660 people participated in the Democratic primary and 118,958 people participated in the Republican primary.

At over 91% of the Republican primary base, those Democratic primary voters could have tipped the results in a LOT of Republican primary races.

And it gets better.

Because most primaries in the US still use first-past-the-post or “pick one” voting, unconventional candidates have an outsized chance of winning in crowded fields.

Let me explain.

Let’s say there are 2 conventional, closely-matched candidates running in a primary. If we add an unconventional candidate who, say, campaigns on calling a sortition-based constitutional convention, that unconventional candidate only needs half the number of supporters that the conventional candidates do to win. This is because the conventional candidates will split the support of their voters.

This effect gets more powerful the greater the number of closely-matched conventional candidates that run.

To summarize, I think we should run candidates for state legislature WITHIN the primary of whichever party is dominant in as many districts as we can. If the district is Republican, run as a Republican. If the district is Democrat, run as a Democrat.

Then we mobilize supporters in that district to affiliate with that dominant party, regardless of their political ideology (including recruiting people who normally vote in the losing party’s primaries).

Finally, we have these supporters show up in force in the dominant party’s primaries and vote in our candidate, taking advantage of vote splitting.

If our candidate wins the dominant party primary, it sets them up to coast to victory in the general. It could also cause the dominant party to split and weaken, which isn’t a bad outcome either in my opinion.

I don’t think we should attempt to be sneaky about this. I think we should be as transparent and vocal as we can about what we are trying to do and how we are doing it, both to raise awareness about sortition as well as to draw attention to all of the flaws and vulnerabilities in our current system.

Look, it makes me feel gross designing a strategy where we benefit from geographic inequality, gerrymandering, low voter turnout, partisanship, and vote splitting, but those are the EXACT same weapons that aristocrats and oligarchs and big corporations are using RIGHT NOW against ALL OF US.

Republicans. Democrats. Third party voters. Independents. Non-voters.

All of us.

There might not be a single other issue where we are all on the same side, but we are all in THIS ONE together, whether we realize it or not.

We must unflinchingly commit ourselves to political legitimacy based, first and foremost, on democratic accuracy.

Well-designed sortition processes will get us there.

It is time to let the people rule.

You can help by joining us at sortitionUSA.org/members

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“A Game of Dice” by Ferdinand Leeke

Sortition is a tool. A powerful one that can promote equality, guard against corruption, represent enormous populations, and impartially distribute benefits and burdens throughout society.

But sortition is only a tool.

Sortition was used in Athens, a society that excluded women, held slaves, and frequently engaged in violent conquest of its neighbors.

Sortition was used to stabilize oligarchies in Italian city-states during the Middle Ages.

Sortition is used in modern-day juries within justice systems that are frequently harsher on marginalized people than they are on the privileged.

How we use the tool of sortition depends on what our purpose is.

In “Why Democracy” I argued that if we want to maximize our probability of survival and minimize the degree to which we are coerced, we want a government that will…

1. Include all people who wish to use the same natural opportunities within the same government.

2. Give all people who must follow the rules an equal say in making them.

3. Govern with the greatest consensus possible.

If we take these characteristics seriously, we immediately encounter a major scale problem.

The atmosphere and oceans are natural opportunities that everyone on Earth depends on for survival, so… we need to attempt to give an equal say to every person on Earth?!?!

But not just a “say.”

We need to attempt to reach “the greatest consensus possible” with every person on Earth.

Consensus implies people are informed, fully participating, and able to deliberate with each other.

So… the democracy we want isn’t possible?

No. We just need the right tool.

Not some high-tech, black box AI output that can’t be verified.

No.

A simple, ancient tool that has been refined into the most empirically validated method we have for dealing with scale: random sampling.

In other words, sortition.

Our purpose for using the tool of sortition is to accurately determine what all of us would decide if we could all fully participate, become informed, and deliberate with each other to reach the greatest consensus possible on every issue.

Let’s explore how to use sortition, given that purpose.

“Fully participating” means that people have an equal and robust opportunity to engage with a process and are motivated to do so. When we expect people to participate in sortition processes, we need to pay them well, cover their dependent care, and make accommodations for language barriers and disabilities.

To motivate people to fully participate, we must deal with the problem of rational ignorance.

When one person is a vote among millions, it is not rational for them to spend much time becoming informed, because it won’t make a difference. Rational ignorance is a free-rider problem that incentivizes people to take shortcuts and rely on others to tell them what to do.

We use sortition in order to put people in situations where becoming informed THEMSELVES is a good investment of their time. This means that we should not attempt to make sortition samples as large as possible, but only as large as NECESSARY to be representative. We need people to see that spending their time becoming informed WILL make a difference.

Becoming “informed” doesn’t mean blindly listening to authority or getting brainwashed. Becoming informed is the process of exposing ourselves to new information with our minds open to the possibility that we are wrong. The point of becoming informed is to discover the limitations of our current knowledge and to understand the pros and cons of the approaches available to us so we can accurately apply our VALUES to a 230decision.

If we are “deliberating” with the goal of reaching “the greatest consensus possible” we need to design sortition processes to go beyond plurality or majority rule when they can. When we develop policy proposals, we need to make space for people to express their objections, develop alternative proposals to address those objections, and then use tools like Condorcet voting to find which of the proposal alternatives is preferred by the greatest number of people.

When we say “all of us” we mean EVERYONE who’s expected to follow the rules.

If we only use voluntary samples, we won’t get all types of people and our samples won’t be representative. For example, using only voluntary samples will unfairly decrease the influence of the busiest people and unfairly increase the influence of the most idle.

Although we should work to minimize coercion and only use mandatory sampling sparingly (for example to decide whether fully developed proposals are better or worse than the status quo, see below), it is not possible to eliminate all coercion from government.

It is less coercive to force relatively small, short-term samples into ensuring that we have just laws, than to have unjust laws and force everyone to follow them.

If we are going to “accurately determine” what all of us would decide, then we should apply the most empirically validated statistical techniques we have.

At a minimum, we need to understand that our samples are only temporary stand-ins. The longer that we have groups serve and the more functions that we have them perform, the more our samples will diverge from the population that we’re trying to approximate.

For example, any group that spends the time necessary to carefully craft a policy proposal is going to be biased in favor of their own work. Because of this bias, at least two fundamental types of sortition groups should be used…

1. Proposal Assemblies to develop proposals, and

2. Policy Juries to decide whether those proposals should be enacted.

Because the members of Proposal Assemblies will need to spend a long time learning and actively deliberating with each other in order to reach “the greatest consensus possible,” we probably need to make participation in these assemblies voluntary and limit their size to a number where all-to-all communication is practical. Probably no more than 150 people. Because voluntary sampling will introduce bias and because 150 people is not sufficient to represent large populations through simple random sampling alone, we should use stratified random sampling for these Proposal Assemblies. The multi-stage stratification process described by DemocracyNext in their “Assembling an Assembly Guide” makes good sense for this purpose.

However, stratification does introduce bias in the form of human judgment about which characteristics to stratify. “Should we stratify based on gender identity, sex assigned at birth, or both?” There’s not an objectively correct answer. For this reason, we should avoid stratification for the final Policy Juries that determine whether proposals are enacted. To reliably represent large populations using only simple random sampling, we need to increase the size of our samples to around 400 people. In order to maximize representativeness while minimizing coercion, Policy Juries should have mandatory service but should only last as long as it takes to cover the pro and con arguments for a single proposal and then privately vote to decide whether it will replace the status quo.

Because good ideas or critical insights might come from anywhere, both Proposal Assemblies and Policy Juries should probably be preceded by public input periods. These public input periods should provide a level playing field for anyone to submit and review relevant ideas, so that the best ones can rise to the attention of the Proposal Assemblies and Policy Juries. Systems like Pol.is would be well suited to fulfill this function.

Attempting to reach “the greatest consensus possible” should not be mistaken as an endorsement of supermajority thresholds. Supermajority requirements bias our government in favor of the status quo at the expense of democracy. Supermajority thresholds give the dead hand of the past a stranglehold on the present.

Instead, when it’s necessary to validate the accuracy of critical decisions, we can repeat sortition processes before policies are enacted. If two Policy Juries agree that a proposal should become law, that will increase our confidence in that decision. If Policy Juries disagree, we can repeat that Policy Jury until we are sufficiently confident about what “all of us” would decide.

Now, all of that seems like a ton of work.

I want to be clear that not every decision in a democracy needs to be made this way. But any government that claims its legitimacy is based on the “consent of the governed,” by definition, should ensure that any delegation of the people’s power is always based on the most accurate system available to determine what “the governed” would decide if we were all informed, fully participating, and able to deliberate with each other.

I think that sortition (representative random sampling) would be a much more accurate way to get the will of the people than the elite popularity contests we currently use. If you think most people would agree with me, then we come to a sobering realization: we don’t live in a democracy.

But, is democracy that important?

Well, if we don’t give everyone who must follow the rules an equal say in making them and earnestly attempt to find the greatest consensus possible, then the currently strongest voices may obscure even stronger coalitions hidden within the group. We want to find the strongest and most stable government because we want to maximize the number of people willing to help us and minimize the number of people who could be motivated to harm us.

The democracy we want is about maximizing our chances of survival and minimizing coercion.

It sure seems like that might be really important in the not-so-distant future.

The design recommended in this article is based on “multi-body sortition” as developed by Terry Bouricius

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An illustration from Puck Magazine entitled “The Laughter of the Gods” depicting two small figures arguing over ‘democratic’ and ‘republican’ principles as four large figures look down on them in amusement: a Republican Boss, a Dive Keeper, Privileged Interests, and a Democratic Boss.

I previously wrote an essay entitled “Why Sortition” where I outlined my arguments for why I believe the fundamental power in democracies should be held by short-term representative random samples of the people, because random sampling is the most accurate, empirically validated method we have to understand large populations.

But I skipped a step.

I skipped “Why Democracy?”

But first!

“Why Government?”

Well, because there are many scenarios where what is best for the individual is harmful for the group (i.e. tragedies of the commons, free rider problems, etc.). These collective action problems are not simply products of our own society. They have always existed. There are many possible ways to deal with them, but essentially all the solutions could be fairly called ‘government.’

“Why not aim to replace the ‘government of persons’ with the ‘administration of things’ and let all people do what they want in a state of communist abundance?”

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” and all that.

Because there is no objective definition of ‘need.’ Because as long as people care about different things and have to cooperate on a finite world, we will need to decide how to allocate scarcity.

Alright, what about…

“Freedom and democracy are not compatible. Why make a government any larger than it has to be to secure markets, enforce contracts, and protect private property?”

Well, because most of the things upon which all human lives depend were not created by any human (i.e. land, water, air, natural materials, low-entropy energy from the sun, etc.). So any method of assigning permanent ownership of them is essentially arbitrary. In cases where all uses of these natural opportunities are not simultaneously compatible, we need to determine who can use what and how.

Now that I’ve attempted to respond to those less common perspectives, let me ask again: “Why democracy?”

The answer is survival and the psychology of fairness.

Because it takes competence and effort to stay alive, living people usually have a basic level of competence and a desire to continue surviving.

Do you want to survive?

Fantastic!

Human survival seems to have generally been predicated on cooperation throughout history.

Extending this concept further, all other things being equal, the more people we can get to cooperate with us, the more power we will have to continue surviving and pursuing meaning.

Because we can’t assume a universally-agreed-upon reason for surviving or ‘purpose’, we should attempt to maximize the number of people who are empowered to pursue their own purpose by governing with the greatest consensus possible.

To minimize destructive conflict and collective action problems, we should attempt to include all people who wish to use the same natural opportunities within the same government.

And because most people will not voluntarily accept less influence over their lives than others have, all people who must follow the rules should be given an equal say in making them.

If we want to make this democracy adaptable across the greatest range of possible sci-fi futures, we should define ‘person’ as any individual who COULD communicate with us and who we believe could change their own mind about whether to support or oppose us.

Groups who are unwilling to include new people out of concern that it might shift consensus away from the current group’s preferences, risk being outcompeted or replaced by groups who ARE willing to be more inclusive and find greater consensus.

And this is why I believe most people, out of a desire to maximize their probability of survival while minimizing being coerced, would support what might be a solar-system-wide, inclusive, consensus-based democracy committed to the flourishing of as many people as possible.

Democracy is so intuitive to most people that, if you happen to be one of the few individuals who seriously insists on NOT dividing power equally, the most viable strategy to get what you want is probably manipulation.

More on that in a minute.

What sorts of people insist on not dividing power equally?

Well… the US founding fathers.

The founding fathers believed that they were members of a ‘natural aristocracy’ that should rule over the rest of us. They believed that ‘We The People’ should be governed by our ‘betters.’

They thought this arrangement was best for everyone. They seemed to unironically believe this was the case for women, non-whites, and people who didn’t own land.

With that perspective in mind, let’s consider why the founding fathers - people who repeatedly badmouthed democracy - designed a system of government where elections play such a central role.

Could it be that elections are not actually that democratic?

Let’s consider some empirical data.

Less than 2% of state legislators come from working class jobs, but approximately 50% of the US labor force is currently employed in those types of jobs.

I very much doubt that figure is any better for Congress.

Are these workers just consciously voting in their “betters” to make their decisions for them, or is there something else going on here?

Do YOU think it’s a good idea for the people who make our economic decisions to have economic interests so different from our own? Do you think our “betters” will keep our values at the forefront of their minds when the next recession or depression rolls around?

I don’t.

There’s no law that says our rulers have to be significantly wealthier than the rest of us, but that is definitely what elections seem to produce. Consistently. All over the world.

Elections, when we think critically about them, are a forced choice about who to delegate decisions to - and we, as individuals, have no control over what decisions we are delegating or which middlemen are available for us to delegate to. And wealthy, well-connected people who don’t have to work or care-give just have a much better chance of being seen as ‘viable’ in the critical, early ‘invisible primaries’ of the donor class.

Looking back to the founding fathers, the reasons they chose to use elections should now be getting clearer.

“But maybe elected politicians do really make better decisions than average people!”

Nope.

In the domains that are exclusive to politicians, there are no objectively ‘right’ answers.

There are no objectively ‘best’ decisions.

Anyone can hire experts to help them make good TECHNICAL decisions, but for politicians it’s all about values.

The job of a politician is to balance competing priorities and decide what the goals are.

No one can be an expert on another person’s values.

No one can tell you what your priorities are.

Attempting to make someone else’s value decisions for them, is attempting to manipulate them.

And that’s pretty much what I think has been going on. I think we have been manipulated into believing that politicians…

1. are necessary to scale our democracy and

2. are better at making our value decisions for us than we are for ourselves.

Absolutely absurd.

This deceit is accomplished by convincing us that ‘democracy’ and ‘elections’ are the same thing.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that sortition should replace all elections immediately. If regular people are good with the way the system is operating, then it doesn’t need to change. If we can design a system to keep our representatives sufficiently accountable, then that is just fine.

I just want the people who have to follow the rules to get the opportunity to rewrite them when the system is operating poorly.

And since it’s probably not possible to meaningfully include every single person in the writing of every single policy that will affect them, the best we can do is approximate the consensus that all of us might reach using representative random samples.

And if you believe that your perspective is too unique to be represented by statistically valid, random samples of your peers, then you must know that you weren’t going to decide those issues all by yourself through direct democracy anyways.

The critical thing, in my opinion, is that we give representative random samples of the people the power to update the rules for our rulers - areas where elected politicians have built-in conflicts of interest, like redistricting, campaign finance, and constitutional reform.

If you think that’s a good idea, consider joining us at sortitionUSA.org/members

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An illustration from Puck Magazine titled “The Headsman” depicting an executioner labeled ‘The Senate’ winding up to behead some ‘Progressive Legislation.’

It’s sometime in the future. We the people, through incredible determination, sacrifice, and luck, have beaten the oligarchs, special interests, and giant corporations. We, the governed, have control of our own government. We’ve hammered out good consensus policies among all of us. We’ve managed to avoid poison pills and concessions to the already powerful. We are on the cusp of an unprecedented flourishing of the middle class. People everywhere are looking forward to a future of security and abundance. Suspend your disbelief! We have won.

Now how do we keep it?

Before we interrupt this beautiful moment with that question, let’s look back at what an incredible accomplishment this will be.

According to work done by Open Secrets, on average, the Congressional candidates who raise the most money win their elections more than 80% of the time.

Now, correlation is not causation. We can’t prove that money was the decisive factor. In many cases, by the time the general election rolls around, it seems like it might be a case of reverse causation: the candidate most likely to win gets the most donations. “So money doesn’t really control our elections!” the talking heads proclaim. Never mind that that money must be paying for something, and that ‘something’ is influence over the details of the presumptive winner’s policies. Influence that might be decisive for issues that don’t rise to the same level of media importance as, say, whether the 10 trans athletes in US college sports can compete as the gender of their preference.

Kind of makes you wonder if we are intentionally being baited by the media and donor class with red herrings to avoid more important issues that we might find consensus about.

Too conspiratorial?

For sake of argument, misusing the 80% figure from Open Secrets, let’s just say that the probability of a totally non-corrupt politician winning against a politician willing to sell the American people down the river on any issue that’s not constantly on national news, is about 20%.

But one candidate’s election doesn’t determine the balance of power in Congress. No, we need to find the probability of electing these non-corrupt politicians to at least a majority of the Senate seats (51) AND a majority of the House seats (218).

This analysis is totally ignoring the supermajority thresholds present in both chambers of Congress and the existence of the President and the Supreme Court.

Ask your favorite statistician the following question:

What is the probability that an event that has a 20% chance of occurring, occurs at least 218 times in 435 trials (a majority of seats in the House) and then occurs again at least 51 times in 100 trials (a majority of seats in the Senate)?

As far as I can tell, it would be about 1.3 with 68 zeroes in front of it. So, it would be a miracle.

We better hope that the probability of non-corrupt politicians winning is WAY better than 20%.

Now, I know the candidates who raise the most money are not de-facto corrupt. And no, coming from a privileged background that gives someone a viable opportunity to run for Congress does not guarantee they will make all of their decisions in favor of their own social class.

But… being dependent on all those campaign donations and spending all that time chumming around with the upper crust probably has SOME influence on politicians, right? Certainly politicians who ignore the policy preferences of their social circles and the big donors who make their campaigns possible have some reduction in their chances of getting elected, right?

Let’s say non-corrupt, class-traitor politicians have an average chance of winning their elections 49% of the time, rather than only 20%. Then, the rough probability of a majority of both houses of Congress being controlled by these non-corrupt class-traitors would be 12.88% (go ask your favorite statistician the same question above, but replace 20% with 49%).

Now back to that beautiful moment in the future. Never mind how we did it. We won. Good job us.

If there’s only about a 13% chance our non-corrupt, class-traitor politicians hold a majority of Congress at any given time, then the upshot of this is that EVERY ELECTION, there is about an 87% chance that they get replaced by a CORRUPT majority that immediately starts to reverse the policies that were going to give us that ‘unprecedented flourishing of the middle class.’

It may be true that nothing in this world lasts forever, but I think you’ll agree that we really need to do better than those odds.

Unless you believe that corruption makes essentially NO DIFFERENCE in a politician’s chances of getting elected - or you believe that our non-corrupt, class-traitor politicians will PERFECTLY eliminate any chance of corruption from elections on their first try - we need some other way to keep our government from decaying back into an oligarchy.

IF we win that beautiful future, the way we keep it is not with elections.

So… how do we keep it?

Here is my proposition to you: I think our best strategy for keeping a government of, by, and for us is to put short-term representative random samples of the governed in charge of writing the rules for our rulers. Like a jury for the constitution, we need to put sortition at the heart of the amendment process.

We need this at the federal and state levels.

If there’s ever a global government that will effectively regulate the atmosphere and oceans upon which we all depend, we will need sortition for that government too.

We the people must not base our hopes for keeping power on the odds that we outbid oligarchs and mega corporations for control of our governments every election cycle for the rest of time.

The only group that is inherently aligned with the well-being of all of us, is all of us. And since it isn’t possible to have literally every one of us deliberate at constitutional conventions every couple of years, we should use the next best thing: representative random samples. Not elite middlemen who we HOPE are non-corrupt, class traitors. Not privileged revolutionaries. Not a vanguard party. Us, using sortition.

If you want to help make that sortition-based ‘jury for the constitution’ a reality, we could use your help! Join us at sortitionUSA.org/members

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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.

There’s a famous 2014 study by Gilens and Page that compared survey data of American’s policy preferences with what our politicians actually passed. They found that average Americans “have a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

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.

And more recently, sortition has been used in civic assemblies around the world to decide some of the most complicated and divisive political issues, from abortion, to land use, to climate change.

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.

The 2025 Australian Constitutional Values Survey found that among a representative sample of over 7,000 Australians, only 16% had any trust in their politicians and only 1/3 said they had trust in the Australian system of government as a whole.

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!

1. Join us at sortitionUSA.org/members.

2. 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.

3. Read “Democracy Without Politicians” by Terry Bouricius or similar books. Consider reading as a group or buying copies for libraries.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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!

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