In recent years, democrats both inside and outside the academy have begun to reconsider the merits of the age-old practice of sortition, the random selection of political officials. Despite this fact, however, the comparative assessment of the merits of voting and sortition as methods of assigning public responsibilities remains in its infancy. This paper will advance this project by considering the respective contributions of voting and sortition to political equality. Random selection is the appropriate method for distributing a public good when all claimants have equal claims to that good and there is not enough of the good to go around. Because of this, both sortition and voting (under a universal franchise) both respect political equality in a sense. But while sortition allows a randomly-selected minority to exercise actual political responsibilities, voting allows the entire public to exercise a much more minimally valuable political capacity.
