Election by Lot and Choice

Election by Lot and Choice is a rule for assigning magistracies according to the work they require and the structure of government. It distinguishes the lot from deliberate choice not as universally competing methods, but as procedures suited to different offices and regimes: random selection can express equality where public service is a common burden, while choice is appropriate when a post calls for special talent or when the constitution locates appointment authority elsewhere.

Two Methods and Their Political Meaning

The rule begins from a distinction between two ways of filling offices: choice and lot. Both methods have been used in different republics, and the election of the Doge in Venice preserves a complicated mixture of the two. Their coexistence does not make them interchangeable. The relevant question is what kind of political act an appointment is and what kind of government must perform it.

The election of rulers belongs to government, not to sovereignty. That distinction explains why the lot is more natural to democracy: democratic administration is better, in this account, when it has fewer acts. The procedure for choosing a magistrate therefore concerns the conduct of government rather than the sovereign people’s lawmaking authority.

The Lot as a Shared Civic Burden

In a real democracy, magistracy is not a prize or personal advantage but a burdensome civic charge. It cannot justly be laid on one citizen rather than another by an individual’s preference. The law can assign the duty to the person on whom the lot falls: because the conditions are the same for all and the outcome does not depend on a human will, the appointment does not create a particular exception to the law’s universal character.

This rationale differs from the familiar defense that a lottery is fair because it harms no one’s prospects and gives every citizen a reasonable hope of serving the country. The argument here is institutional rather than merely distributive. The lot is appropriate when citizens are sufficiently equal in morals, talents, principles, and fortunes that it becomes almost immaterial who is selected. Yet such a fully realized democracy is acknowledged to be an ideal, not an ordinary political condition; the defense of random appointment is therefore conditional, not a claim that every real society can dispense with judgment of ability.

Matching Procedure to Office

When choice and lot are combined, the office’s requirements determine which method fits. Posts requiring particular talents, including military positions, should be filled by choice. Judicial offices, by contrast, may be assigned by lot when good sense, justice, and integrity are enough—and when a well-constituted state can assume those qualities to be common among its citizens. The contrast turns on the nature of the task: specialized demands justify selection, while offices grounded in broadly shared civic qualities can be distributed by chance.

The rule thus makes no blanket preference for randomness. It sets a division of labor between the procedures, with choice answering to demonstrated or needed capacity and the lot preventing an ordinary public charge from being allocated through a person’s discretionary will. The division also preserves the law’s role: where the office does not require special qualifications, assignment by lot can make equal civic standing visible in the way duties are distributed.

Aristocratic and Monarchical Exceptions

In an aristocracy, the prince chooses the prince; government is preserved by itself, and voting is accordingly well ordered. Appointment by choice suits a system in which the governing body reproduces its own membership. The Venetian mixture of lot and choice is not a counterexample to the distinction, because a mixed procedure is fitting to a mixed government.

Monarchy follows a different logic. Neither lot nor vote has a place in monarchical government as described here: the monarch is by right the sole prince and only magistrate, so the choice of lieutenants belongs to the monarch alone. The proposal by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre to multiply the councils of the King of France and elect their members by ballot would therefore do more than alter the method of filling posts. It would change the form of government by transferring appointment away from the monarch.

Across these cases, the method of election reveals where governing authority resides and what the constitution regards as the nature of office. The lot is most intelligible where public service is an equal burden; choice is needed where ability must be singled out or appointment belongs to a defined ruler. Election is consequently not a neutral administrative detail: its procedure expresses the political order that assigns responsibility.