Edit to say that your point is interesting and one I hadn't really thought about. This make elections a referendum on the most salient topics, which I guess makes sense. I still think that in elections there are a lot of other factors that influence decisions and given certain voting preferences there are a lot of arbitrary factors that influence the results, more so that in sortition, whose main drawback, as I see it is how little we know about how it would work in practice.

Original message: But even for salient issues there are a lot of random factors in elections. Suppose there is a issue so important that everybody cares and votes based only on that issue. Suppose there are only two candidate, and they have a clear and opposing position on this issue so that things are very simple for voters.

Suppose candidate A gets 50,999,897 votes Suppose candidate B gets 50,456,002 votes

B can still win, as happened with Bush, depending on the voting system. This is just an example and of course depends on the specific voting system. The real point being that for sortition you have simple statistical guarantees, always, independently from salience.