From Plato to Acton, Thomas Jefferson to Bertrand Russell, it was regarded as a truism to many great thinkers that those who desire power are the least to be trusted with it. As such, it is unsurprising that from the first experiments in representative government, sortition—election or enfranchisement by lottery—was the popular method reached for by those who sought to safeguard the state from the entrenched tyranny of those who pursued power for its own sake or to enrich themselves.
Indeed, the practice of selecting political officials or decision-makers by lot has a long historical tradition, particularly in ancient and medieval republics like Athens, Florence, and Venice. A look at how sortition was fruitfully applied in these famous cases is illustrative of how it might be equally fruitfully applied to the present American context.
In ancient Athens, sortition was a central component of democratic governance. The Athenians believed that choosing public officials by lot was a way to prevent corruption and the undue influence of wealth or popularity on politics. That is, sortition in Athens was seen not only as a way to prevent the power hungry from taking office and becoming entrenched, but as an egalitarian tool; elections as favoring the wealthy or famous, selection by lot as more democratic, enabling ordinary citizens to hold office.
As such, the ruling Council of 500 (or Boule) was selected by lot and had significant power in preparing legislation, managing day-to-day affairs, and ensuring accountability of magistrates. Members served for a year and could not serve more than twice in their lifetime, ensuring a wide range of citizens participated in governance.
Of the magistrates, many administrative positions were filled by lot, especially lower-level offices, while jurors in Athenian courts were chosen by lot from a pool of citizens over thirty. In both cases sortition was used to minimize bias and corruption, as citizens rotated regularly in these roles.
In Renaissance Florence, sortition played a role in the selection of public officials, particularly in its system of government after the establishment of the Signoria, a council responsible for governing the city. Many other magisterial offices were also filled by lot from a pool of eligible citizens, typically drawn from guilds or specific political factions and with terms typically spanning about two months. A form of fair power-sharing between competing factions, it was largely successful in limiting the entrenchment of powerful elites despite frequent attempts at factional interference.
In the Venetian Republic, meanwhile, a mixed system of elections and sortition was employed. For example, the process for its Doge, or Duke, the chief magistrate of Venice, involved multiple rounds of both sortition and election to prevent the influence of any one family or group. The process started with the random selection of a group of electors, who would then vote on further electors, culminating in a final group responsible for choosing the Doge. This complicated procedure was designed to minimize the chances of manipulation or corruption.
As for its ruling council, Maggior Consiglio, membership was largely hereditary, but many offices and functions within the council were filled by lot, maintaining a degree of randomness and fairness in distributing power.
As in Florence, Venice’s blended system of election and random selection preserved stability and limited the dominance of any single family or faction for hundreds of years.
In all of the above cases, in fact, sortition served as a successful mechanism for limiting corruption, elite domination, and political maneuvering—democratic Athens was only overthrown by military defeat at the hands of Sparta and the Peloponnesian League, the Republic of Venice by the advent of Napoleon, and the Florentine Republic by the rise of the Medici.
Its use in Athens represented a more direct form of democracy, where it was a tool for involving ordinary citizens in governance while simultaneously preventing the entrenchment of powerful elites; while in Florence and Venice, sortition was combined with other methods to check the ambitions of powerful families and maintain a balance among the elite.
There are myriad problems with universal suffrage—and even if one sets such normative theoretical debates aside, taking a purely consequentialist view of the last fifty years one must doubt the democratic verities insistently trumpeted by its defenders.
In the words of the political scientist Claudio Lopez-Guerra, who many years ago during my undergrad inspired my initial investigation into sortition:
“In spite of the many efforts to justify ‘democracy,’ political philosophers have failed to make a compelling case for an idea that almost everyone takes for granted: that universal suffrage is the only morally acceptable way of constituting the electorate in an election based representative system.”
In the United States today, elected officials have no special competence. Bills are written by lobbyists, and if they are read at all it’s by congressional aides. Voting by the representatives is done either in accordance with the party line or at the behest of a particularly powerful backer, with the plurality of members’ time spent on fundraising. All of this makes one of the main arguments against something like sortition, or term limits, that of lost “expertise,” something like a bad joke. So, too, cries that it “denies the voter’s choice,” because as anyone who has been paying attention the last several decades knows: the uniparty and permanent bureaucracy make the decisions, thank you very much.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that a government of our randomly selected peers, each serving single terms, would produce a worse mess than the one produced thus far by universal suffrage.
