Talk:Sortition

message: The section of this article which discusses athenian sortition mentions that Athenians did not consider elections democratic. That claim, along with much of the section--when it does not draw on primary sources--refers to a single scholar as a source. Considering that Athenians did use elections sometimes, in addition to sortition, I wonder whether this claim could be disputed, and if so, whether it is necessary to the content of this article. I'm not sure myself, but would encourage anyone with more knowledge of how Athenians conceived of elections and sortition respectively to take a look!
TherealLiamplsc308 (talk) 00:57, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Athenian Elections

message: The entry currently says that "Arguably, selection by lot is a more democratic process than election by vote, since sortition is less influenced by money and fame. Aristotle and other classical writers who discussed the subject took this view."
While there are statemnts by Aristotle (Politics, book 4, chap. 9) saying that sortition is democratic, I am unaware of any specific argument offered by him for why this is so. The same, as far as I know, is true for  Montesquieu and Rousseau. All these authors seem to take it for granted that sortition is democratic, but fail to provide any arguments. I think the entry should be changed to correctly describe this situation. --Drono 04:14, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aristotle and classical analysis of sortition 

message: The following text was on Allotment, which was looking nothing like the dab page it claimed to me. It seems a bit too good just to delete, so I'm putting in here for someone to merge into this article if thought appropriate. Cheers --Pak21 11:30, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Text from [[Allotment]] 

message: Selection bias and the potential incorrect math, sortition is not certain to be fair and any statement alledging it's fairnss should refer to respected source on statistics/probability applications.  i kan reed 00:54, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Fairness

message: Much of the pros and cons for Sortition are found in a similar form in the Demarchy article. I'm thinking that Demarchy should be merged into this article as a result. --One Salient Oversight 11:57, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Done, finally :) See old talk-page and revived 2014 discussion of merger at talk:Demarchy#Merger_proposal_.28again.29_.5Bdecember_2012.5D  ★NealMcB★ (talk) 18:55, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Demarchy

message: In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :) 
* "MorgenIsonomia" :
** The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes", Mogens Herman Hansen, ISBN 1-85399-585-1
** The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes", Mogens Herman Hansen, ISBN 1-85399-585-1
DumZiBoT (talk) 02:31, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bot report : Found duplicate references ! 

message: The reading of this article has been one of the best experiences of roaming the Wikipedia so far. I simply want to credit all the contributors for this. This was unexpected and gave way to new realizations, and renewed political enthusiasm in me. Thanks --Xact (talk) 22:37, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Appreciation 

message: My favorite passage from Ken MacLeod's novel Dark Light:
: Drawing lots is fair, even if it sometimes throws up a freak result.  With elections you’re actually building the minority problem right in at every level, and lots more with it – parties, money, fame, graft, just for starters.  What chance would that leave ordinary people, what chance would we have of being heard or of making a difference?  Elections are completely undemocratic, they’re downright antidemocratic.  Everybody knows that!
—Tamfang (talk) 23:07, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  a fictional view 

message: You can ensure representatives are enthusiastic about representing the population by a lottery system: each person who is enthusiastic can get one ticket. Then draw among the ticket holders instead of the whole population.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.206.137.118 (talk) 16:09, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Enthusiasm of the representatives 

message: See Why a citizen’s parliament chosen by lot would be ‘perfect’  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lsky (talk • contribs) 22:34, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Models 

message: I am part of a Yale undergraduate course studying representative government and its evolution.  As part of my studies, I plan to research lotocracies and strengthen this page.  I am incredibly interested in the use of lot within republics and I believe that by improving this article I can help to spark conversation about sovereignty and representation.  Below I have outlined some intended changes, and I would very much appreciate any and all feedback.  I look forward to working with the Wiki community on this article, and I thank all of you for your hard work in providing the world with knowledge.
Introduction - I plan to expand this portion of the article with additional summarization of later points and introduce new information about general pro/con themes.
1 History - Additional information, after research, will be added about historical examples of sortition. This especially includes a deeper dive into the systems of Greece, Venice and Florence.
Example: "In Athens, to be eligible to be chosen by lot, citizens self-selected themselves into the available pool, then lotteries in the chlorite machines.  The magistracies assigned by lot generally had terms of service of 1 year. A citizen could not hold magistracy more than once in his lifetime, but could hold other magistracies.  All citizens over 30 years of age, who were not guilty of atimia, were eligible. Those selected through lot underwent examination called dokimasia in order to avoid incompetent officials.  Rarely were selected citizens discarded .  Magistrates, once in place, were subjected to constant monitoring by the Assembly.  Magistrates appointed by lot had to render account of their time in office upon their leave, called euthynai.  However, any citizen could request the suspension of a magistrate with due reason.
In Florence, systems of lot were used to select magistrates and members of the Signoria during republican periods.  Florence utilized a combination of lot and scrutiny by the people, set forth by the ordinances of 1328 .  In 1494, Florence founded a Great Council in the model of Venice.  The nominatori were thereafter chosen by lot from among the members of the Great Council, indicating a decline in aristocratic power .  
Lot was used in the Venetian system only to select members of the committees that nominated candidates to be considered by the Great Council for political posts.  A combination of election and lot was used in this multi-stage process.  Lot was not used alone to select magistrates, unlike in Florence and Athens. The use of lot to select nominators made it more difficult for political sects to exert power, and discouraged campaigning .  By reducing intrigue and power moves within the Great Council, lot maintained cohesiveness among the Venetian nobility, contributing to the stability of this republic.  Top magistracies generally still remained in the control of elite families."
2 Advantages - I plan to add 1-2 more advantages.  Additionally, I plan to connect some of the advantages back to historical examples of their success.
·Effective representation of the interests of the people
·Fairness & Equality
·Democratic
·Less corruptible than elections
·Fair representation
·Power to ordinary people
·Voter fatigue
·Loyalty is to conscience not to political party
3 Disadvantages - I plan to add another disadvantage, 
The difference between arithmetical and geometrical equality as outlined by Isocrates .
Choosing the correct mean is essential to correctly estimating the central tendency of a population or calculating investment returns.  Although the concept of an average may seem simple, it is imperative for a user to carefully consider which mean to use–and to communicate to reader or intended audience the method of deriving the average and the rationale for doing so.
·Pure sortition does not discriminate
·Misrepresentation
·Sortition can put in power people with minority views
·Voting confers legitimacy
·Some forms of sortition entail compulsion
·Enthusiasm of the representatives
·Accountability
Methods - These processes are generally measured in terms of political efficacy.  Researchers at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center originally introduced the concept of political efficacy in their mid-twentieth century studies of national elections in the United States.  Campbell, Gurin, and Miller defined efficacy as the "feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process, i.e., that it is worth- while to perform one's civic duties". Later researchers convincingly argued, though, that efficacy is not simply a unidimensional construct. Instead, efficacy consists of at least two related, but distinguishable, concepts: (1) external efficacy, which refers to citizens' perceptions of the responsiveness of the political system to their demands, and (2) internal efficacy, which refers to the citizens' feelings of personal competence "to understand and to participate effectively in politics."
Examples - This portion seems redundant after “History.” I will add further examples to it, such as the Great Council of Venice , to make it more substantive.
Hollymjg95 (talk) 18:08, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intended alterations to article 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Sortition. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090717172552/http://www.sos.state.nm.us/pdf/NMElectHdbk.pdf to http://www.sos.state.nm.us/pdf/NMElectHdbk.pdf
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20120828182918/http://ragemag.fr:80/populiste-nest-pas-un-gros-mot-entretien-avec-etienne-chouard/ to http://ragemag.fr/populiste-nest-pas-un-gros-mot-entretien-avec-etienne-chouard
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 07:29, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Is there any objection to merging Stochocracy in here?  There has been a proposal on the Talk:Stochocracy page since 2012 to merge it in here.  According to terminology - Is there any difference between demarchy and stochocracy? - Politics Stack Exchange, "Stochocracy is just an attempt to translate the french word stochocracie, which is a word used to refer to any democracy that uses sortition to select its decision makers." ★NealMcB★ (talk) 19:46, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge [[Stochocracy]] 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Sortition. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20071228190617/http://www.uow.edu.au:80/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/92kio.html to http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/92kio.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 05:32, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Sortition. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20110714044240/http://www.masslbp.com/downloads/MASSLBPSortedfulltext.pdf to http://www.masslbp.com/downloads/MASSLBPSortedfulltext.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 22:32, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: In the article, exposes the lack of legitimacy of Sortition as a disadvantage. You should notice that in Athenian Democracy that was not considered a disadvantage at all. I'll try to explain why: If you are not chosen, you don't have legitimacy. That is, you can't do what you want, because nobody chose you. That is a disadvantage if officers must not answer for their work, but is an advantage if power resides on the assembly like in Athenian Democracy. That is: It may be an advantage or disadvantage depending on how the political system works.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rober2D2 (talk • contribs) 15:58, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voting confers legitimacy. Disadvantage? 

message: Hello, I have tried to add a link to the German article
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losverfahren
but for whatever reason when accessing the English version, it is not displayed. If it is not displayed after a revision, kindly add it. Thank you.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.105.160.157 (talk) 12:31, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  German version 

message: I clicked on a link that said "drawing lots", because I was curious how one actually "drew lots" as opposed to "drawing straws"; instead I find this dense article full of talk of people who have done so, why they did so, the pros and cons of doing so, but nowhere does it describe how the actual process of "sortition" works. If I hadn't come to this page by clicking "Drawing lots", I'm not sure I'd even be able to figure out that that's what you are talking about. It says "whereby politicians are randomly selected"...there is nothing to indicate that they are selected by a system of drawing marked "lots". I'd have assumed that you were talking about eenie-meenie-miny-moe or something. And then, it still doesn't say anything about "drawing lots" in modern culture where we don't have these lots-drawing machines. What is a "lot"? How are they marked? I read something elsewhere about a man "drawing the black spot", but otherwise I'm mystified, and this page hasn't helped me at all. Maybe there is something in here and I just missed it amongst all the rest, but if so, then it really should be easier to find. The page on Drawing straws is concise enough! AnnaGoFast (talk) 19:02, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Okay, but how is it actually DONE? 

message: The claim that sortition combats corruption seems debatable because of Unaccountability. Yes, it makes manipulation of selected officials more expensive, but there is a danger that money appropriation by officials can become the norm. By contrast, elected officials are scrutinized for corruption (albeit with limited success) and bear (limited) consequences for it. Pgan002 (talk) 21:03, 27 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Corruption 

message: I am the director of New Tasmanian Democracy, and I placed the image into the article as a way to explain how it might work.
It was removed as a "promotional image".
However, there are two important points:
1. The image is under a creative commons license, so there are no copyright problems.
2. The image depicts how sortition might work in one particular area, and how it might replace an electoral system.
3. Many political articles have images sourced from various special interest groups as a way of explaining issues.
If someone replaces the image I uploaded with a similar one that is more generic, I will not complain.
--One Salient Oversight (talk) 03:14, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image from New Tasmanian Democracy 

message: It has been proposed that People's jury be merged into Sortition.
* Oppose. The institution of a People's jury uses sortition, but has unique characteristics of its own, and is discussed as a distinct concept in sources. Daask (talk) 16:12, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  On further investigation, there are three separate pages for citizen's assembly, citizen's jury, and people's jury. There is a lot of overlap between these four pages and none of them is of stellar quality; I think they should be merged into two pages, perhaps three. --PDVk (talk) 18:01, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge with People's jury 

message: * Support the merger of People's jury and Citizens' jury.--Geysirhead (talk) 06:53, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Revised proposal to merge [[Citizens' assembly]], [[Citizens' jury]], and [[People's jury]]

message: An unreferenced paragraph of Lottery:
:The first recorded Italian lottery was held on 9 January 1449 in Milan organized by the Golden Ambrosian Republic to finance the war against the Republic of Venice. However, it was in Genoa that Lotto became very popular. People used to bet on the name of Great Council members, who were drawn by chance, five out of ninety candidates every six months. This kind of gambling was called Lotto or Semenaiu. When people wanted to bet more frequently than twice a year, they began to substitute the candidates names with numbers and modern lotto was born, to which both modern legal lotteries and the illegal Numbers game can trace their ancestry. 
--Error (talk) 02:15, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin of lottery 

message: — Assignment last updated by SirChristian1673 (talk) 13:44, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Open Democracy

message: "In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy."
The two sources cited don't mention sortition at all, as far as I can tell. The first looks like a bibliography or works cited page and the second doesn't ever mention the word "sortition" (Ctrl+F). 50.47.164.241 (talk) 07:42, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sortition as principal characteristic 

message: ==== More examples ====
In 2019, the German speaking Ostbelgien region in Belgium, implemented the Ostbelgien Model, consisting of an 24-member Citizen's Council which convenes short term Citizen's Assemblies to provide non-binding recommendations to its parliament. Later that same year both the main and French-speaking parliaments of the Brussels-Capital Region voted to authorize setting up mixed parliamentary committees composed of parliamentarians and randomly selected citizens to draft recommendations on a given issue.
The Amish have used sortition to a slate of nominees when they select their community leaders. In their process, formal members of the community each register a single private nomination, and candidates with a minimum threshold of nominations then stand for the random selection that follows. Local government in parts of Tamil Nadusuch as the village of Uttiramerur traditionally used a system known as kuda-olai where the names of candidates for the village committee were written on palm leaves and put into a pot and pulled out by a child. Superb Owl (talk) 20:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Examples removed from main body due to poor sourcing 

message: In 2019, the German speaking Ostbelgien region in Belgium, implemented the Ostbelgien Model, consisting of an 24-member Citizen's Council which convenes short term Citizen's Assemblies to provide non-binding recommendations to its parliament. Later that same year both the main and French-speaking parliaments of the Brussels-Capital Region voted to authorize setting up mixed parliamentary committees composed of parliamentarians and randomly selected citizens to draft recommendations on a given issue.
The Amish have used sortition to a slate of nominees when they select their community leaders. In their process, formal members of the community each register a single private nomination, and candidates with a minimum threshold of nominations then stand for the random selection that follows. Local government in parts of Tamil Nadusuch as the village of Uttiramerur traditionally used a system known as kuda-olai where the names of candidates for the village committee were written on palm leaves and put into a pot and pulled out by a child. Superb Owl (talk) 20:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  More examples