Random selection is democratic

Federal Council safeguards include random selection and qualification screening of candidates. Random selection, also called sortition, is the key to ensuring that the members of a Federal Council are independent, diverse, and protected from any outside influence. If members of a Federal Council were elected, appointed, hired, or chosen by any group, then politics would come into play, which would allow control over members of the council.

Selecting government officials randomly isn't a new idea. Athens typically used random selection to choose their public officials. Voting was seldom used as it was considered the least effective democratic method for selecting public officials. Athenians thought that elections favored the wealthy and celebrities over normal citizens. Random selection was considered the most democratic method for choosing decision-makers. They even invented a special machine, a kleroterion, to guarantee the randomness. [1] A number of books and articles have proposed using random selection for our legislators instead of elections. [2]

Equal opportunity of selection to serve

Two aspects of random selection provide equal opportunity for applicants. First, random selection ignores economic status, gender, age, race, skin color, sexual orientation, religion, political ideology, disability, hair, and every other possible categorization. Names drawn from pools would be as random as numbered balls drawn in a lotto. Forcing councils to have a certain number of minority members would not provide equality. It would merely continue to focus on divisions and categories. Random selection is blind, without categories. All citizens would have an equal chance of being selected from the pool giving them an equal opportunity to serve on Federal Councils.

Second, to have equality in government, the makeup of an administrative group must mirror the natural distribution of the entire population. Random selection from pools of candidates would provide such a distribution, assuming the mix in the pool matches the population. While some pools may naturally limit applicants due to qualification requirements, if enough applicants were in the pool, it should represent the population as close as is possible.

Granted, a single Federal Council would only have 9 members so it could not exactly mirror the population distribution at any given time. However, everyone would have an equal chance of being selected. Therefore, across all Federal Councils, the population distribution would be represented. In addition, over a long enough time span, the cumulative total of members of each Federal Council should fairly represent the population distribution. It would certainly be fairer than the current system.

A first in US history

An equal opportunity such as this has never occurred in the history of our federal government. The current 117th Congress lauds their diversity as the most diverse Congress to date. Figure 10-1 shows their actual diversity compared to the population's diversity. Note that five of the members belong to two minority groups and are included in the stats for both. Therefore, the total number of minorities is actually 133, not 138.

Figure 10-1 [3]

Equality brings a sense of fairness and hope

When I was a child, grammar school children across the country were told that someday they might become President of the United States. Unfortunately, that wasn't true unless their parents were sufficiently connected with the elite political network. To be part of the political club, the maturing child had to be willing to be coopted by one of the major political parties and to conform completely to the party's ideology and policy. However, in the future any child regardless of wealth, race, religion, or gender would have an equal chance to be on the Presidential Council.

Random selection from a large pool of independent candidates would end the influence by the power elite, political parties, and any special interest group in one fell swoop. There would be no way to stuff the candidate pool, as there would be too many candidates in the pool to make any type of stuffing effective.