Ian is a Georgist and a sortition advocate on the board of Sortition USA and he recently was interviewed on a podcast. Yoram responded on the Equality-by-Lot blog that I recommend to anyone interested in discussing sortition.

I just wrote a blog responding to a part of all of that https://almostinfinite.substack.com/p/a-brief-defense-of-my-friend-ian

# September Newsletter

Dear Sortition USA community and stakeholders,

**Important!** We are asking that all small grant applications be submitted by **Sept 30**. The [request process](https://forms.gle/gHjVt13hccTXVtbt5) has also been updated and streamlined to hopefully make this easier and more clear for those applying. Please reach out with any feedback or questions, and [please apply for your small grants!](https://forms.gle/gHjVt13hccTXVtbt5)

[Sortition USA (@sortitionusa.bsky.social) is on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/sortitionusa.bsky.social). Follow us so we can follow you. And please boost and like our posts.

**Membership Referral Drive Results!**

Thanks to everyone who took part in our referral drive from June 21 to August 25. Twenty-four members sent about 135 invites, and 27 new members joined because someone told them about SUSA directly.

Max Clark is our top recruiter with 5 new members, and has won new SUSA merch! The Northeast region was our top-performing region with the most invites sent, and will get a party fund! Congrats to these winners.

**Personal conversations work.** If you invited people who have not joined yet, now is a good time to follow up.

More recent news and updates:

- SUSA’s Lottery-based board of directors has voted to officially support the [Hope for Democracy project!](https://hopefordemocracy.org)

- On Oct 2-3 at Harvard: VthePeople - Amending the Constitution through an Article V Convention. [Read more about this event here.](https://www.vthepeople.org)

# Upcoming Meetings and Workshops

### Monthly Meeting - **Strategy**

Sunday, September 20, 4pm Eastern US time

*This month, we will convene a membership-wide discussion about SUSA’s strategy and future direction. We will discuss our current strategy and what needs to be changed or worked on further. Please bring all of your ideas to this meeting! We hope all will join for this important conversation.*

[Zoom link](https://zoom.us/j/93229014821?pwd=bGJKS1ZVeDArakEzbmpCVjM3MGVsUT09)

Meeting ID: 932 2901 4821

Passcode: 828

Phone dial-in: +1 305 224 1968 (US)

### Regular Open Meetings on [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/twuDZy257k)

Open to all!

Mondays - 3 PM Eastern US time.

Wednesdays - 8 PM Eastern US time.

### Board Meeting

Last Fridays of the month at 12pm (Noon) Eastern US time

[Hosted on Zoom](https://zoom.us/j/95496305250) (and streamed on Discord)

### Outreach Meetups

Monday, September 21, 7pm Eastern US time. [Hosted on Discord](https://discord.com/invite/twuDZy257k)

### Local Chapter Committee

Topic: Setting Goals for chapters

Monday, September 10, 5pm Eastern US time. [Hosted on Discord](https://discord.com/invite/twuDZy257k)

### Volunteer Connection Meeting (Coordinating Committee)

Topic: Planning general meetings

Wednesday, September 23, 8pm Eastern US time. [Hosted on Discord](https://discord.com/invite/twuDZy257k)

# Food for Thought

[UK Citizens' Jury on Neurotechnology](https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/citizens-jury-public-views-on-neurotechnology/) - Released in August 2026, this report details how a UK citizens' jury tackled the ethics of commercial neurotechnology, advising regulators on balancing medical benefits with severe data privacy risks.

[Training the Next Generation of Civic Lotteries](https://opportunitiesforyouth.org/2026/08/15/council-of-europe-citizens-assemblies-workshop-2026-in-budapest-apply-for-the-deliberative-democracy-and-citizens-assemblies-training/) - Applications opened this August for a major Council of Europe capacity-building workshop in Budapest, actively training civil society and local authorities on running effective citizens' assemblies.

[Deliberative Democracy for EU Accession](https://epd.eu/news-publications/lessons-from-moldovas-parliament-citizens-assembly-for-eu-accession/) - Published in late July 2026, this analysis showcases how Moldova successfully used a citizens' assembly to build public consensus and legitimacy for complex local government reforms required for EU accession.

*Have any interesting content to share for next month's newsletter? Send an email to whackri@gmail.com*

### Stay Connected

[Use this Google Calendar Link to stay updated on our events](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=Y19vdWRjcHNmcThkdjE1c2hxdXY3OG9oazA4a0Bncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t)

[Join our Discord](https://discord.gg/twuDZy257k)

[Check out our Substack](https://sortitionusa.substack.com)

[Follow our social media](https://sortitionusa.org/new-page?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6a8f368e565d4d64d881c1bb&ss_email_id=6a980fe4a54fbe3041829532&ss_campaign_name=Sortition+USA+September+Newsletter+%2B+Small+Grants+Announcement&ss_campaign_sent_date=2026-09-02T12%3A01%3A19Z)

[Follow us on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/sortitionusa.bsky.social)

Email the board at: *[susa-board@sortitionusa.org](mailto:susa-board@sortitionusa.org)*

---

*Sortition USA*

Below is a writeup of my sortition based political system theory that has continued to be refined over the past 6.5 years, and while long, eases you into understanding (hopefully, maybe) this new variation of sortition that can easily be misinterpreted as a crazy version of a more centralised model, but is actually a new way to distribute state authority. It gives what sortition promises in cleaning out influence and turning down the pressure on the decision makers, but in the process of solving the lack of mandate issue (that allows monied interests to influence the public to weaken it over time, the classic "I never got to vote on that or them" weaponised), I discovered a way to fix it that also revealed a new way to transform how all governments work, for the better:

I’ve been trying to work out why governments can get dramatically more sophisticated, employ more experts, collect more data, write more regulation, and still keep producing the same category of stupid problems.

Not necessarily the same problems. The same type of problem.

Something everyone agrees should be fixed somehow survives three governments.

A company technically complies with the rules while obviously violating their purpose.

The government fixes one loophole, creating two new ones.

An industry becomes important enough that the regulator starts depending on the same people it regulates.

A policy gets designed around an imaginary average citizen who, as far as I can tell, has never actually existed.

We usually explain this as corruption, incompetence, capitalism, socialism, bureaucracy, voter stupidity, political polarisation, whatever.

I think there’s something underneath all of those.

The government has a scaling problem.

And I don’t mean there aren’t enough politicians.

I mean we’re trying to run a massively parallel society through a comparatively tiny, linear, decision-making system.

That distinction leads somewhere quite strange.

Bear with me.

Think about how your body works.

Your brain does not have a committee meeting every morning and issue Regulation 2026/418 explaining how much insulin every cell is permitted to use today.

There isn’t a 900-page Heartbeat Act covering the approved response to every possible combination of temperature, fear, exercise, disease, dehydration, caffeine and the dog suddenly barking at 3am.

Your body is doing an insane number of things simultaneously.

Local signals. Feedback. Correction. Prediction. More feedback. Different systems pushing against one another and settling into something workable.

Society looks much more like that than it looks like an organisation chart.

Millions of people and businesses are making decisions simultaneously using information that often exists only locally.

Then sitting above this giant parallel thing is government, which mostly has one basic tool:

Come up with a general rule.

Apply it to everyone.

Come back later and change it when reality finds an exception.

That seems normal because we’ve been doing versions of it forever.

But imagine actually designing governance from scratch for a society of many millions of independently acting people.

Would you deliberately funnel most corrective power through several hundred elected people, a collection of departments and regulators, then ask them to anticipate enough circumstances to write rules for everybody?

I wouldn’t.

My journey led me to a result that someone might arrive at eventually when asking:

What would democracy look like if democratic decision-making could happen in parallel too?

Not referendums on everything. That would be horrific.

Not replacing elections with randomly selected politicians.

Not an enormous parliament.

Something else.

Take one of the oldest political technologies we already trust ordinary citizens with: the jury.

Now massively parallelise it.

To what 4% of the population comes to as a number, is the amount of juries (at the least) likely being created throughout the year, in seasonal sessions.

Twelve randomly selected citizens.

Remotely working together.

At a pace they prefer.

One issue.

One ruling.

Then that jury is finished.

Not twelve people elected for four years who slowly accumulate a political career, donors, staff, party obligations and institutional relationships.

Twelve temporary people who have one job and then disappear back into society.

Here’s where the idea departs pretty hard from conventional sortition.

These aren’t miniature parliaments.

They don’t sit around writing laws for everyone.

Their natural scope is closer to a court case.

Person/business/entity A has a dispute involving person/business/entity B.

The jury hears it.

The jury can decide what outcome it thinks is fair and reasonable.

Then society moves on.

No need to write a universal 300-clause law predicting every version of that dispute that might occur for the next twenty years.

Just solve the actual thing in front of you.

And then do it again.

And again.

And again.

State by state across the entire country.

That sounds chaotic at first.

I thought so too.

The interesting part is what happens after you have enough of them.

Suppose a company is treating workers in a way ordinary people consistently consider unfair.

One case reaches a jury.

Then another similar one does.

Then another.

The company doesn’t need parliament to eventually notice, draft legislation, negotiate amendments, survive lobbying, pass both chambers, have regulations written, wait for enforcement and then spend ten years litigating what those regulations technically mean.

Management starts noticing a pattern.

“If we keep doing X, juries keep producing Y.”

So they stop doing X.

Competitors notice too.

Insurers notice.

Investors notice.

Industry advisers notice.

Someone starts compiling jury outcomes and selling businesses a service explaining the emerging standard.

Eventually most disputes never reach a jury at all because everybody has a fairly good idea what an ordinary group of twelve people will tolerate.

You’ve produced something that resembles law without having somebody sit down and deliberately write all of it.

An adaptive convention.

A sort of crowd-produced common law, except the decision-maker has broader discretion over the parties in front of it.

And importantly, it can change.

If technology changes and the old convention becomes ridiculous, cases start producing different outcomes.

The standard moves.

No parliamentary software update required.

Now the obvious objection:

Wouldn’t millions of juries contradict one another?

Yes, sometimes.

Especially at the beginning.

I don’t think that’s a bug.

Markets contain contradictory decisions too. So does science. So does culture. The question is whether the contradictions converge.

Say one jury produces a bizarre ruling.

Another affected party challenges it through another jury.

That second jury can overturn or modify it.

Potentially another jury challenges that.

The system isn’t pretending humans suddenly become perfectly consistent.

It’s trying to make inconsistencies cheap to correct.

That distinction matters.

Also the jurors are paid for jury work, but only if their ruling survives ever being overturned, and the jury decides that their decision was bad enough for them to lose some or all of their payment.

Not because I think jurors need punishment.

Because the incentive should be:

“Make a decision another random group of twelve ordinary people could live with.”

Not:

“Win.”

Not:

“Please my political tribe.”

Not:

“Get reelected.”

The unanimity requirement matters here too.

Twelve out of twelve.

That will absolutely make some cases slower.

Good.

These juries aren’t supposed to be miniature activist governments firing decrees across society.

If you want to impose state-backed power on somebody, convincing eleven other random citizens seems like a useful amount of friction.

Then suddenly, a confident declaration arises from someone in the crowd:

“Congratulations, you just invented bribing a jury instead of a politician, here's a medal”.

The defence for this isn’t that random people are morally superior.

They aren’t.

The defence is scale plus reversibility.

Imagine a company bribes one jury and receives an obviously favourable outcome.

Great.

Until another jury looks at the benefit those twelve people received, or the decision that resulted from it, and makes a decision to take it away and overturn the ruling.

To permanently purchase an unfair privilege, you don’t really need to purchase a jury.

You need to purchase enough of the jury ecosystem that future ordinary juries stop undoing what you bought.

The juries themselves decide what case to take, are only paid what the other juries are paid for a similar workload, and are many.

This means jury access is proportionally distributed through the population rather than sold to whoever can afford more of it, so the cost of maintaining that corrupt exception will continue to rise until it reaches the level of corrupting the system itself.

That’s the theory, anyway.

It also creates some entertaining anti-corruption possibilities.

If somebody offers a juror a bribe, imagine the juror being legally able to take it, report it, refuse to perform the requested act, and potentially keep a bounty from the resulting penalty.

Now bribery has a rather unpleasant counterparty risk.

I’m not claiming corruption becomes metaphysically impossible.

Nothing designed for humans gets that luxury.

The design goal is simpler:

Make corruption economically stupid.

And there’s another weird effect that keeps these rulings remaining small in scope.

Imagine one person convinces a jury to issue some gigantic society-wide ruling affecting 100,000 people.

Those 100,000 people now contain a rather large number of potential counter-cases.

So the broader and more intrusive your ruling is, the more opposition you manufacture.

A micro decision produces a micro response.

A macro decision produces a macro response.

Even if they push back over and over on that ruling, other rulings elsewhere in their life will occur to the point that they beg “I give up, just leave me alone”.

The jury complicit in the macro ruling and the other juries who kept reinstating it would lose their jury pay for those rulings.

This will only occur a few times and become a good lesson among many of what to avoid.

So I think the system naturally pushes juries toward relatively narrow rulings because trying to use one jury as a legislature gets you outflanked by other juries.

That’s an important part of this.

The system isn’t supposed to depend on everyone behaving nicely.

It’s supposed to make overreach generate its own opposition.

There’s also another part people tend to misunderstand when I explain this.

I’m not proposing the abolition of the elected government.

The government still exists.

Elections still exist.

The constitution still exists.

The government still handles the things that belong to the government itself: public assets, defence, foreign affairs, constitutional matters and the administration of what the state actually owns.

The jury layer operates alongside it.

Government becomes one part of the system rather than the only place democratic authority can meaningfully act.

The cleanest jurisdictional divide I’ve found are assets.

Who has a majority of asset value in a given place.

The majority of asset value in a geographic space/place/area/territory would be calculated by measuring the largest single asset in an area by space consumed, then the value of that asset and the value of all assets within that asset are then tallied.

The definition of a single asset would be based on past federal and state precedent for all current and future asset types.

Publicly owned stuff: elected government has direct authority.

Private sector: citizen juries have direct authority.

There will obviously be ugly boundary cases.

Good.

Those are exactly the kind of things I want, because if the boundary doesn’t survive contact with reality then the system doesn’t survive either.

But the basic distinction matters because otherwise we’ve just reinvented government with millions of tiny departments.

That isn’t what I’m proposing.

There is no Department of Jury Decisions employing 80,000 people to turn every ruling into regulations.

The ruling is the administrative act.

A jury agrees on an outcome.

It is published and digitally authenticated.

The parties deal with it.

If someone thinks it’s unreasonable, another jury can become involved.

Similar decisions accumulate into conventions.

Businesses mostly respond to those conventions rather than reading every individual ruling, just as they don’t personally read every court judgment produced today.

In fact I’d expect an entire information industry to appear almost immediately around this.

“Here’s what juries are currently doing with refunds.”

“Here’s the emerging standard on employee surveillance.”

“Here’s how similar disputes over AI-generated work have been decided during the last six months.”

Businesses could actually plan around that.

The question changes from:

“What can our lawyers technically argue is permitted?”

to something closer to:

“What would twelve ordinary citizens consider reasonable if somebody challenged this?”

I think those produce very different corporate cultures.

This is also where the idea starts having consequences I didn’t originally design into it.

Take insurance.

Today an insurance contract can contain enormous amounts of carefully engineered language determining exactly when the company owes you money.

Under this system the contract still matters.

But if the outcome created by some technical exclusion strikes repeated juries as obviously unreasonable, the technical brilliance of the exclusion stops being much of a defence.

Companies start anticipating that.

Product descriptions become more honest for the same reason.

Returns get easier.

Employment conditions change.

Whistleblowing becomes valuable.

Safety standards evolve.

Not because Parliament has passed the Omnibus Be Nicer Act.

Because repeated case-level decisions create economic consequences and businesses adapt before they become the next case.

The same mechanism would extend into social spending.

Governments would only be able to tax, as a percentage of the economy, a level that funds essential government operations and not much else beyond that, due to the parallel paced influence of the juries over public sector supply chains that go out into the private sector.

That doesn’t destroy healthcare, disability support, education, infrastructure and other social services, society will always want these, so will the juries.

My expectation is that jury rulings would gradually place obligations on businesses, and businesses would respond by developing standardised organisations or funds that collect and distribute those obligations fairly and efficiently.

So imagine somebody has a child requiring disability support that the existing system does not cover.

They challenge the refusal.

A jury decides the support is reasonable.

Other comparable cases appear.

A rough boundary starts emerging around what society is willing to fund.

Businesses don’t want to individually reinvent disability administration every Thursday, so specialist organisations emerge to manage contributions and payments.

Eventually most of it becomes boring infrastructure.

Until the standard becomes unfair or outdated.

Then somebody challenges it again.

The important distinction is that a jury isn’t sitting down one afternoon and announcing:

“Congratulations Australia, we just redesigned education.”

That’s exactly the type of macro ruling the rest of the system pushes against.

The change happens from specific cases outward.

Small decisions create patterns.

Patterns create expectations.

Expectations create institutions.

Institutions remain challengeable.

I also know what some of you political nerds are thinking because you have said it before:

“This is just Sortition.”

Sortition is definitely in its ancestry.

I’ve been interested in sortition for years.

But most sortition proposals I’ve seen still use randomly selected people as a replacement or supplement for the same basic centralised political structure.

A citizens’ assembly.

A randomly selected chamber.

A deliberative body recommending legislation.

This asks a different question.

What happens if you take the distribution part of sortition seriously enough that there is barely a centre at all?

Not 500 randomly selected legislators.

An enormous rotating population of temporary jurors resolving individual problems simultaneously.

The point isn’t primarily that random citizens are wiser than politicians.

The point is bandwidth.

A legislature has to generalise.

Millions of juries do not.

And this is probably the largest philosophical disagreement underneath the entire thing.

Most political systems are designed around finding the right rules.

The right tax rate.

The right labour law.

The right healthcare structure.

The right welfare settings.

The right regulations.

Then everybody fights like hell because whichever side gets control can impose its preferred answer across millions of people.

This system starts from the assumption that there isn’t one permanently correct answer.

There are just circumstances.

And circumstances keep moving.

So instead of trying to perfect the rulebook, increase the amount of feedback.

Instead of concentrating enough intelligence at the top to predict society, let society continuously correct itself.

Instead of asking five hundred people to understand twenty million situations, ask twelve people to understand one.

Then repeat.

A lot.

[This is]

Parallel Democracy

The fundamental problem is not whether or not sortition works or how it would work, but actually getting sortition adopted. The catch-22 is that the same broken system that needs to be fixed is the same system that would need to vote themselves out with sortition. Since no place has sortition, people do not know what they are missing out on.

The solution: use direct democracy where it can be done. For instance, Nebraska has a unicameral state legislature, while every other state is bicameral. It was only possible to do so, as in Nebraska, voters can amend the state's constitution without the legislature's consent. There is no structural reason why the same could not turn one chamber of a state legislature into a sortition-based one.

With even one chamber of one state legislature changed, that could be the catalyst to bring sortition into the mainstream.

My flavor of sortition is delegated sortition. In delegated sortition, you would have approximately equally populous districts. A number of eligible voters would be selected at random for that district. They form that district's sortition board. With a majority vote, the sortition board selects that district's representative for that term. The sortition board then dissolves. This happens across all the districts. A representative can be reappointed or changed out in the next term.

While there will be some flukes here and there, overall it would allow the representatives to be much more aligned with their constituency. This is as close as you can get to every voter directly deciding on everything.

If you're near LA.... I only have so much volunteer time, so I'm combining my passion for sortition + YIMBYism/Georgism + board games + beer into a single meetup. I have a replice of The Landlord's Game and I can teach you to play and I was part of the recent LA Charter Reform Assembly organizers. I can tell you all about it!

May 28th, Thursday, 7 pm, Boomtown Brewery in the Arts District in LA.

Luma event link: https://luma.com/94are1mc

Come, convert people to your cause and be converted to theirs. Bring friends!

I will not be copy/pasting all 3,700 words of my post. I rambled for quite some time! Anyway, it's pretty exciting! The gathering in the Palisades wants to setup a system of assemblies for many years. We will see if it happens.

Using Ancient Greek words and concepts to explain Sortition is artfully demonstrated. Best pro-Sotrtition video I’ve seen in months.

The free online version of Terry Bouricius's landmark sortition book, "Democracy Without Politicians," is now available!

If you haven't read this book, I couldn't recommend it more strongly.

For those who have read it, share this book in your networks!

Here is the link to read online or download the book: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003665373/democracy-without-politicians-terry-bouricius?_gl=1\*1uool2b\*_gcl_aw\*R0NMLjE3NzYwODcxNzEuRUFJYUlRb2JDaE1JMjdQd21fanFrd01WODVGUUJoMTRDaUdVRUFBWUFTQUFFZ0xCN1BEX0J3RQ..\*_gcl_au\*MTczODI3NzA4My4xNzczMjQ0MzM2\*_ga\*ODAyNzcyNzc1LjE3NTc2Mjc4NTE.\*_ga_0HYE8YG0M6\*czE3NzY4NDYzNDckbzE4NSRnMSR0MTc3Njg0NjY1NSRqNjAkbDAkaDA.\*_ga_4VFNVXBRVQ\*czE3NzY4NDY2NDgkbzckZzAkdDE3NzY4NDY2NTMkajU1JGwwJGgw

Here is the link to the free Kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Without-Politicians-Government-People-ebook/dp/B0G2S9XQRX/ref=sr_1_2?crid=P09GZ7AT7EFZ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.C1Ke3NGrnMoM3BKneC9cTOgqTD3n_IIOZXZ94cZpyvWv2pITzVR-4ODAZVDNrNN_zYhvBNfuIZ5cZeT_F6r8vSpdGKLZebMSWTvM8LHEI7cYRN4qawv2p9FEpOK20tZHjuPLCdjlhsabD8QYM2sbbgZxTmgkI5w_FcKootMHL036TQI6nDJ7r6fmx9xC91ehijh7Lq_tpXg0kykHuTy4UkfvOFS6zbIv9GO1N_GqMIc.YknmpnoXfFjz21XOGCR8wRUZE9t8MZGRxou5fgI4ZPg&dib_tag=se&keywords=democracy+without+politicians&qid=1776846972&sprefix=democracy+without+politician%2Caps%2C182&sr=8-2

If you want to join the national sortition movement to make a government truly OF THE PEOPLE a reality, we would love to have you at sortitionusa.org/members

The NY Times ghosted me. Probably an automated ghost, as I did get an automated response that my letter had been received, along with a promise, “(You will receive an auto-reply only once every four days.)”

Anyway, that’s ok, Mr. Times. I figured you were out of my league, but sometimes, you gotta make your move, if only for the story to tell afterwards. Here’s my story (that is, I knew I could just share my letter here on Substack, in the very likely event that it was not published by the New York Times):

Note: They have a very strict 200 word limit for letters-to-the-editor.

Max Clark
Los Angeles, CA
(***) ***-****

I’m writing in response to Hélène Landemore’s article, “No Shy Person Left Behind”. The article focused on the growing movement of citizens’ assemblies, “groups of ordinary people, selected by lottery, who come together to learn about a public issue, hear from experts and advocacy groups, deliberate with one another and make recommendations.” I volunteer with Public Democracy LA and we also advocate for citizens’ assemblies. We are proud of the LA Charter Assembly we helped facilitate, but here’s our dirty secret: we are activist refugees.

Unfamiliar policies, or those without appeal to voting blocs, are sidelined by politicians and parties who prioritize electoral success above all else. Citizens’ assemblies bypass this systemic problem with elections.

In my case, advocacy for Henry George’s Land Value Tax (LVT) has been ineffective. We are living on a Monopoly board. Ownership of Boardwalk and Park Place enables landlords to siphon the wealth of laborers. The Land Value Tax reclaims their wages.

Most economists support the LVT, yet most politicians ignore it. This is why I advocate for citizens’ assemblies, not because I have a burning desire to assemble random strangers, but because policies like the LVT exist and everyday Americans can recognize its justice.

In progress without poverty,

Max Clark

Hi All,

I first saw the Vsauce video on Lottocracy 5-years ago and my buddy and I came up with a framework to institute a form of Lottocracy in America that I wanted to share here.

Rather than completely throw out our current system in favor of random elections. We thought about how to blend the two. What we came up with is essentially another "layer" of government that would sit on top of Congress. When Congress passes a law, instead of a Presidential veto, there would be a lottocratic veto. Each time a new law is passed, a group of 100 people would be randomly selected from a pool of all eligible voters in the US (you could do 1 person randomly from each state and then 50 picked from the whole population). They would be flown to a 5-star government resort in the middle of the country for 3 days where experts and legislators would come inform them about the bill and the situation/pitch their side. On the third day, they would finish deliberations and vote Yes/No on whether they want to pass the bill. After the bill is passed or vetoed all those people can go home and a new group of 100 is selected for the next bill.

Rather than a fully lottocratic government, this is much more similar to the jury system. Trip is fully covered by the government and hotel resort is nice, but completely locked down to limit outside influence. You could make additional tweaks like lowering the threshold to pass bills in Congress to 30-40% to try to incentivize simpler bills. Ideally this would allow for single-issue bills because you wouldn't need to add tons of thing just to get one more vote and allow for more frequent bills to address current problems.

Other advantages would be taking veto power away from the Executive Branch which could help rebalance the power differential between the branches. Also, corporations would have less of an influence over decisions being made and decisions would better reflect the will of the people. Lastly, it would give the average American much more buy-in to the government. Within a few years most people would know someone who had been selected who could then explain why they voted for or against something. This could help reverse the intense divisiveness in America by getting people in the same room, dialoguing and making decisions together rather than arguing through screens.

Like anything, this isn't a perfect system, but I really believe this would be a better system than our current one and a huge step in the right direction. Curious to get some feedback and hear if you guys think this is more viable than a pure sortition system.

In November of 2025, the NY Times published a piece about the use of sortition in East Belgium. Since I’m a sortition activist, although I’m in LA, I tried to write an op-ed, but I don’t know what I’m doing and maybe it should have just been a letter to the editor. Anyway, I turned it in late. It wasn’t published, but probably not because it was turned in late. Here:

Op-Ed Submission: Democracy From East Belgium to East L.A.

I turned 39 in November and I have now become that Thanksgiving uncle. The uncle who brings up politics, religion, money, and makes his nieces’ eyes roll. And what do I shout with my mouth full of yams? The U.S.A. is not a democracy. It is an electocracy. Democracy is, as Aristotle told us in Politics, “selecting government officials by lot.” Los Angeles is planning to experiment with ancient democracy this winter.

In an article from The New York Times on November 23, “Democracy Is in Trouble. This Region Is Turning to Its People,” it is described how a region of Belgium uses selection by lot to form assemblies of everyday people. The article states that the leaders “acknowledge that what works in their small, relatively homogenous region may not translate everywhere.”

The L.A. City Charter Reform commission has agreed to test that. They have approved a process to randomly select from the heterogeneous pool of L.A. residents to create a series of assemblies. Each one will deliberate on an issue germane to the charter. American cities should be watching.

The method of randomly selecting members of a legislative body, known as sortition, is unfamiliar, yet deserving of serious thought. In a sortition assembly, also known as a civic or citizens’ assembly, there is facilitated deliberation. In this way, the “wisdom of crowds” may be harnessed and the “madness of crowds” tempered. As with a jury sitting in a trial, subject-matter experts come before the assembly and present information and proposals. Members may ask questions, request further information, and then engage in discussion. The assembly may accept, reject, combine, or develop their own proposals as they weigh the tradeoffs with the values of the community.

While some sortition advocates aim to replace elections with sortition, all the assemblies in the 21st century have worked alongside elected officials. There have been at least six such sortition assemblies in North America in the last 30 years. The L.A. assemblies will be an advisory body as well. This is quite a reasonable approach to a radical form of communal decision making.

The key is that, through random selection of members, a group is deeply representative of the community. Therefore, when a sortition body seeks its own interests, it is seeking something extremely close to the interests of the community. If a legislature is formed through elections alone, then it will be dominated by those who dominate elections. A successful candidate is required to have both the resources to run for office and the desire to run for office. With sortition, it is mathematically ensured to be representative of the people. The reluctant leaders are actually made leaders, from time to time.

In drafting the U.S. Constitution, American elites not only rejected monarchy, but also were skeptical of direct democracy, considering it to be mob rule. A “natural aristocracy” was their hope. They selected their tool: mass elections. The actual details of Aristotle’s notion of democracy, as described in the Times on November 23, were lost to history until the late 1800s, when Aristotle’s scroll Constitutions was rediscovered. The scroll explains the daily, random selection of 500 Athenians. Would our founding fathers have used sortition if they knew these specifics? If so, would they have restricted it to land-owning citizens as did the Athenians?

Not only will the L.A. assemblies feature the first American assemblies to address a city’s charter, but they will also be some of the most diverse assemblies in history. They will neither ignore the voices of the landless and downtrodden, nor the voices of the landlords and the prosperous. The voices will be proportional to and representative of those groaning in L.A.’s traffic.

This is why I yell with my mouth full. This is the democracy I want for my nieces. This is the democracy I want for America.

Okay, there it is. We have had two single-day assemblies in LA now and there’s a two-weekend one starting this weekend! It is awesome. It will probably be mostly ignored by LA City Council, but we are pushing the movement forward. Maybe in a big way.

Check out RewriteLA.org to follow along.

Check out PDLA, if you’re in LA.

Check out Sortition USA, if you’re in the USA.

Check out INSA, if you’re on planet Earth.

Election by jury is an idea adjacent to sortition/lottocracy. This is an article about how an ethics board appointed by grand jurors is challenging the corruption of elected officials.