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Comment by fela | Hacker News Reader

Actually, one way to see sortition is as a way of scaling direct democracy to large populations.

Sortition and election are both ways of scaling democracy to populations too large to effectively use direct democracy alone; neither is any closer to direct democracy, and it seems to me that each can be viewed as mitigating the distortions imposed by the other (as our system -- in the US, but the same is true in most modern democracies -- tends to use election much more than sortition, it may be that it could be improved by increased use of sortition,)

I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated. Of course this excludes things like people feeling like participating, which happens in direct democracy but not in sortition.

> I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated.

No, it can't. The likelihood of a particular degree of distortion (sampling error) can be exactly calculated; the actual degree of distortion cannot.

That is true, but you could argue that the same is true with elections. What if everybody that wants to vote in a certain way is sick on election day? Not very likely, and of course in case of elections the number is larger and therefore the probability of (this specific type) of distortion is much smaller. But then one is again talking about probabilities. And in case of elections there are many other arbitrary factors that can influence the results.

> That is true, but you could argue that the same is true with elections.

Sure, but its still not an advantage that sortition has over elections.

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