stackyFACTSImagine electing a senator by picking a name out of a hat.
Imagine electing a senator by picking a name out of a hat. In ancient Athens, most government officials were completely shielded from democratic voting and instead chosen through 'sortition'—a highly randomized lottery system using a massive stone machine called a kleroterion. The logic was that elections heavily favored rich, charming elites, whereas randomly selecting a plumber or a baker ensured a genuinely representative democracy.
Keep exploring facts in this topic.
History →STACKY FOR IPHONEKeep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
Taking over an entire sovereign nation usually requires a massive formal treaty, but lawmakers were heavily impatient. In 1898, pro-annexation politicians…
Discover more
If you think modern political attack ads are toxic, the Romans practically invented the genre. Politicians heavily utilized graffiti and public poetry to…
Discover more
Political debates often get intensely heated, but 14th-century British lawmakers took it to an entirely literal extreme. The 'Statute Forbidding Bearing of…
Discover more
You'd assume civilians would love heavily organized crime prevention, but they absolutely hated the idea. When Sir Robert Peel strictly established the…
Discover more
When you're going to rig an election, you might as well go all out and break the laws of mathematics. Charles D.B. King won the 1927 presidential election in…
Discover more
The concept of intellectual property didn't begin as a noble quest to protect inventors. Fifteenth-century Venice essentially bribed foreign artisans by…
Discover more