Citizens' assemblies (and other deliberative events) use democratic lotteries to bring people together from all across our communities to discuss important issues. Sortition Foundation are the democratic lottery experts. We organise democratic lotteries that are fair, transparent, representative and inclusive, using our Open Democratic Lottery Platform (OpenDLP).
Sortition Foundation has carried out more than 200 democratic lotteries, partnering with governments, councils and community groups, in countries across the world. We are recognised as the world leaders in the provision of democratic lotteries. Our democratic lottery process is cost-effective, legitimate and easy-to-use, which is why we are the partner of choice for deliberative processes around the world.
Contact us or see our brochure for more information.
Why run a democratic lottery?
We believe that for politics to work for people like us, it has to include people like us. That's why we help organisations use democratic lotteries to bring together groups of people for citizens' assemblies and other deliberative processes. 
Democratic lotteries...
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...avoid a room full of “the usual suspects”. Open calls for public consultations are often dominated by people who are politically engaged, whose views are already well-represented in public discourse. A democratic lottery ensures that the ordinary person on the street can have a say.
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...are representative. We use demographic, socio-economic and attitudinal targets to ensure that the people in the room reflect the community from which they are drawn.
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...are fair and inclusive. Everyone in your area has a fair chance of being invited to participate, and of being selected to take part.
What is a democratic lottery?
A democratic lottery is made up of two steps:
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Invitation by lottery: We design accessible invitations to be sent out by post, or email, or by people knocking on doors. We will be inviting people to register their interest in participating in the deliberative process. We use a lottery to select who receives an invitation. E.g. in the UK, we might use the Royal Mail address database to randomly select addresses to receive invitations by post.
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Selection and confirmation by lottery: Once we have a pool of people who have registered interest, we use special democratic lottery software to select a group of people to be our participants. We do this in such a way that the group of people is representative (e.g. balanced by gender and ethnicity). We then contact all the selected people to confirm that they can participate and we replace any who can’t.
We sometimes work with clients who prefer to do the first step themselves -- in this case, they provide us with respondent data, together with targets, and we run the democratic lottery selection for them.
What is the Open Democratic Lottery Platform (OpenDLP)?
The Open Democratic Lottery Platform (OpenDLP) is our platform to streamline democratic lotteries. If you’d like to learn more about OpenDLP please contact us.
More information
We provide free informal advice and support to organisations interested in organising democratic lotteries. Take a look at our brochure or contact us for more information.