Stratified Sortition is what you get when you take Sortition seriously as a democratic ideal, and then run straight into the stubborn physics of small numbers. It’s the modern trick for making “randomly selected citizens” actually look like the public they claim to represent, without turning the whole thing into an audition or a popularity contest.
The basic promise of sortition is simple: we don’t pick the loudest, the richest, the most connected, or the most online. We pick by lot. That single move breaks a lot of unhealthy incentives, because you can’t campaign to be lucky. But if you only pick by lot once, and your group is small, randomness can be unfair in practice.
That is the “why” of Stratified Sortition. It’s still a lottery, but with guardrails. The purpose isn’t to rig the result. It’s to stop the result being rigged by statistical flukes.
# Imagine
Here’s the story version. Imagine you want a Citizen Jury of 24 people, or a Citizen Assembly of 100. You run a pure random draw from the population. You could easily end up with too many retirees, or too few young adults, or a bizarre geographic clump, or a gender balance that feels like a time machine. Nobody has done anything wrong, but everyone watching can still say, fairly, “that doesn’t look like us.” And once that doubt lands, every recommendation becomes easier to dismiss.
# Stratafication
So Stratified Sortition adds a second layer. First you do a broad random invitation, often thousands of letters or messages. Then, from those who say “yes,” you do another random draw, but you pull people into the final group in a way that matches a set of demographic targets.
This is why people sometimes call it a Civic Lottery. The civic lottery framing is the friendlier public story. “We’re running a lottery for civic duty, like jury service, except you get support and compensation.” It’s the same mechanism, told in a way that doesn’t sound like a dusty Athenian noun.
> The world is run by the people who show up.
# Mechanism
If you zoom in on the mechanism, you can see three phases that keep repeating across projects. There is outreach and invitation, where randomness is used to avoid bias and to reach beyond activist networks. There is recruitment and support, where the project tries to remove barriers so that “yes” is possible for more kinds of people. Then there is the stratified draw, where randomness is used again, but constrained by representational targets. The randomness is not removed. It is channelled.
This is also where the politics show up. Which strata count. Which don’t. Whether you treat disability as a stratum. Whether you treat language. Whether you treat migration status. Whether you treat class as income, education, occupation, or something messier. The act of defining strata is not neutral. It is a design decision that encodes values, and it deserves to be documented like policy, not hidden like plumbing.
When Stratified Sortition works, the effect is uncanny. People walk into a room and it feels like a cross-section of the place. Not because anyone curated them, but because the lottery was shaped to avoid the obvious failure modes of chance. That “it looks like us” moment is one of the most important invisible technologies in Deliberative Democracy.
When it fails, it usually fails in one of two ways. Either the strata were chosen badly, and the room looks representative on paper but not in lived reality. Or the support wasn’t real, and the same groups still couldn’t participate, so the “voluntary yes” pool was skewed before stratification even began. Stratified Sortition can’t fix a world where only the comfortable can afford civic time.
The future of Stratified Sortition is not just better sampling. It’s better Inclusion Engineering. Better childcare. Better pay. Better accessibility. Better translation. Better trust-building. And better honesty about what is being optimized: not a perfect statistical mirror, but a group that can deliberate credibly, learn together, disagree safely, and still be recognized by the wider public as “one of us.”
If you want a slogan, it is this: > Sortition is the principle. Stratification is the craft.
# See - Sortition. - Civic Lottery. - Citizen Assemblies. - Citizen Jury. - Mini-publics. - Deliberative Democracy.