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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Honestly, just installing mechanism to easily remove them would be sufficient. Like, elections without a lottery option aren't consent to be governed. If we added a lottery option to ranked voting, the elites wouldn't be able to convince enough people they're decent to actually get elected.
The word and system you're looking for is the ancient Greek democracy, especially from Athens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Ancient Greeks believed that government and positions of power must be randomly selected by a machine from a pool of candidates, and that elections are NOT democratic. That elections are always going to be corrupted by the oligarchy.
Yep, the United States is an electoral oligarchy, not a democratic republic.
What do you mean by lottery option?
All the candidates are on the ballot you add a positive or negative number next to the candidates you care about, maybe we add a party modifier that adds +1 or -1 to all candidates of a party. The computer scans your ballot and puts the candidates in order with those numbers. Unranked candidates (i.e. rank zero) are equal to the "lottery" option. We can use this ranking to define the relation between all candidates and sum these relations across the whole population. Going through these sum relations we start with whatever relation gets the most votes and set that as true (blue > red) and it's opposite as false (red > blue). Then the next and next until we have know how the population ranks all the candidates. Any candidate less than or equal to the "lottery" option gets dropped. Above the lottery option, you start with the top ranked candidate and work your way down until you run out of positions. If you hit the lottery option before running out of seat those seats are filled with randomly selected citizens. The citizens can decline and we re-roll, but there's no opt-in process -- no power seeking.
The book "Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule" by Hélène Landemore advocates for something similar but without the ranked voting part. She advocates just for pure lottery.
Does that mean that she thinks anyone who qualifies to be a candidate is automatically qualified to win?
She advocates for deliberative democracy, so like congress but a randomly selected citizens council/jury that holds power and deliberate and talk about how to solve problems. While I'm not sure if her book said, I get the impression she wouldn't approve of the amount of power presidents wield. She'd probably advocate that position be more subordinate to a people's congress, like congress appointing a head of a department rather than the president being some grand leader. At least that's my impression.
I mean it's probably leagues better than the current system where the only people who get anywhere near the presidency are the powergrubbers.
-- Frost
Randomly selecting from a pool of available candidates?
Maybe if you don't choose it's a vote for a lottery to pick. If half the population doesn't vote then the winner is a random person. So if the authorities manage to prevent people from voting then they can't seize the system with their own pick
Random? I'd hope they were at least qualified. Believe me, I wouldn't want most of the people I know in charge of anything. I wouldn't even trust myself with a town budget.
Right, but this is a democracy we are talking about. If half of the people participating are convinced the entire selection is no better than a random pick then that is very damning.
This is actually why I advocate for the ranked voting combination. We can have qualified career politicians if more than half the population agrees they're qualified and decent people, but if they can't manage that... yeah, the lottery is more an anti corruption mechanism than a way to get rid of politicians.
Do you trust the pedophilic warmongers more than a council of 100 random people? Sure, you'll get a block of idiots and few PhDs, but mostly you'll get normal people with different perspective on life. If you're really worried, ban felons (and PhDs) from the random selection to make sure you get mostly normal people.
Also, who decides who's qualified? You've probably heard this argument about being qualified to vote, but being qualified to rule is just as problematic. Any test you make to decide who can rule will be captured by the rulers and used to entrench their power. Right now the decision is made via campaign financing. On the other hand, if you have random citizens then suddenly there's a very big incentive for every part of our society to make sure everyone is educated and well-treated, least enough of these uneducated or mistreated citizens get randomly selected and collectively agree to remove the problem.
Kinda sounds similar to Jury Duty. I don't know why you'd ban PhDs though.
"Citizens Juries" is a phrase often associated with it.
As for PhDs, Experts have tendency to think they know best and move to capture systems. There's an argument to be made that if you want your opinion respected, you should commit to helping without the benefits and corrupting effect of power.
Experts do know best in their field of expertise, that's what makes them experts. In such a "Citizen Jury" if we lucked out and got a PhD in microbiology I would probably want that person on the FDA committee or whatever.
Excluding someone from the political process because they have an education is called Kakistocracy.
For what it's worth, I have a PhD in Structural Biology, so I'm not exactly an anti-intellectual. In fact, I personally think we should include both felons and PhDs in the selection pool.
That said, I think there are legitimate criticisms of pseudo-intellectual technocrats who use their credentials to push ideology, and I don't think it'd be the worst thing in the world if the people who've already dedicated their life to actually improving the world could sever the (randomly selected) citizens council without having doubt cast upon them via comparison to power-hungry technocrats. If credentials excluded one from direct power, credentials might be seen as a more honest dedication to one's work.
Again, I personally think it's dangerous to exclude anyone from the selection pool. I'm just trying to talk about some of the concerns people might have with the lottery mechanism.
One of the first thing authoritarians do is eliminate or crush intellectuals. The Soviets murdered all of the Polish intellectuals. The Khmer Rouge did the same thing. Even wearing glasses made you "guilty". They don't want anyone who can talk back.