In my recent essay for Boston Review on democracy-by-lottery (i.e., sortition), I led off with an interview with
. Terry’s a Vermonter who made a career as a public official, first in Burlington (The New York Times featured him in a 2016 profile of Bernie Sanders), and then in the State House, where he served the Chittenden 7-4 district for over a decade. But as he relates in the article, his time in the House catalyzed a conversion away from electoral politics toward democratic reformist activism. This began with a stint at FairVote, which advocates for ranked-choice voting, until he discovered sortition. He’s never looked back.
In the ensuing years, Bouricius has become a leading American voice on the theory and practice of democracy-by-lottery. He blogs regularly for Equality by Lot, a community of sortition advocates, and was a contributor to the 2019 volume Legislature by Lot. In 2013, he published an article for the Journal of Deliberative Democracy (embedded above) that outlines an original, promising, highly sophisticated frame for a democratic government run by multiple bodies of everyday citizens from all walks of life.
Terry suspects it could take two-hundred years to implement his sortition design, but he just might be surprised: Three years ago, the German-speaking province of East Belgium moved to institute much of the model in its local governance. I thought it would be great to have Terry on to hear his story, get a bit into the weeds of sortition, and muse about the future of democracy. May it give hope!
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