A civic lottery, a popular term for the contemporary use of

sortition In governance, sortition (also known as selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger ...

or allotment, is a lottery-based method for selecting citizens for public service or office. It is based on the premise that citizens in a democracy have both a duty and the desire to serve their society by participating in its governance. Today, the most common use of the civic lottery process is found in countries which follow

Common Law In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions."The common law is not a brooding omnipresen ...

systems, where citizen juries are summoned to hear and render verdicts in court cases. The term for this is popularly known as

jury duty Jury duty or jury service is service as a juror in a legal proceeding. Juror selection process The prosecutor and defense can dismiss potential jurors for various reasons, which can vary from one state to another, and they can have a specific ...

. Civic lotteries are increasingly popular in Canada, where provincial Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform took place in British Columbia in 2004 and in Ontario in 2006. The membership of each Assembly was determined by a civic lottery which invited citizens to volunteer as candidates. In British Columbia, the government sent 23,034 letters to randomly identified citizens throughout the province. 1,715 replied and volunteered to serve as members of the Assembly. In Ontario, 123,489 citizens were identified during a random electronic draw from the Permanent Register of Electors. Each citizen received a letter inviting him or her to apply, and 7,033 volunteered as candidates. Ultimately, during a final selection process, 158 names were drawn from among the candidates to participate as members of the BC Assembly. 103 were selected as members in Ontario.

MASS LBP Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementar ...

, a Canadian company inspired by the work of the

Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform (Ontario) The Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform was established by the government of the province of Ontario, Canada in March 2006. Modelled on the British Columbia equivalent, it reviewed the first past the post electoral system currently in use to ...

, that has designed and implemented 50 Civic Lotteries between 2007 and 2023, has developed an increasingly sophisticated system for running civic lotteries to randomly select citizens to participate on government advisory panels. The lotteries, which ask citizens to give up several consecutive weekends to participate on a panel, enjoy a strong positive response rate, typically exceeding five percent. This suggests that citizens are more interested in public affairs than declining voter-turnout rates indicate. Panel members are randomly selected from among the pool of candidate-respondents to create a panel that roughly matches the demographic profile of the wider population.

References

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External links

MASS LBP official siteSorted: Civic Lotteries and the Future of Public ParticipationHow to run a Civic Lottery: Designing fair selection mechanisms for deliberative public processes; A Guide and License (Version 1.4)The Ontario Citizens AssemblyThe Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform a record of Ontario’s first citizens’ assembly processThe BC Citizens AssemblyCitizens’ Reference Panel on Pharmacare in Canada
Active citizenship Sampling (statistics)

See also

References

External links