Ancient Greece

Athens, fifth century BC. The first democracy. Government officials were chosen not by election but by lot. The reasoning was simple: elections favour the wealthy and the persuasive, while a random draw gives every eligible citizen the same chance.

They built a stone machine for it, called the Kleroterion. Citizens slotted in identity tokens, black and white dice dropped through a tube, and the matching tokens were selected as officials for the day.

Aristotle later wrote that selection by lot was more democratic than voting. He had a point.

The Bible

Casting lots appears seventy-seven times across the Old and New Testaments. The land of Canaan is divided between tribes by lot. A successor to the apostle Judas is chosen by lot. Roman soldiers cast lots for the robe of Jesus.

Proverbs 16:33 sums it up: the lot is cast into the lap, but every decision is from the Lord.

Korea

The oldest recorded Korean drawing-of-lots story comes from the Samguk Yusa (13th century). A royal envoy was caught in a storm at sea. He wrote the names of fifty soldiers on wooden sticks and threw them into the ocean. Whoever's stick sank first had to remain on an island and face whatever was there. The soldier's name was Geotaji. He stayed, and later became a legend.

The Korean word 제비 (jebi) for drawing lots comes from a verb meaning "to grab". The same tradition runs from ancient omens to modern Korean apartment lotteries.

Japan and China

In Japan, omikuji (おみくじ) are paper fortune slips drawn at temples. You shake a cylinder of numbered sticks until one falls out, find the matching slip, and read your fortune. Bad fortunes are tied to a tree and left behind.

In China, qiuqian (求籤) works the same way: shake a bamboo cup at a temple altar, let one stick fall, and ask a monk for an interpretation. The I Ching, one of the oldest books in human history, is at heart a sophisticated way of asking for a random answer.

Medieval Italy

Venice and Florence ran their republics on a mixed system of voting and random selection so that no single faction could rig the outcome. The Doge of Venice, the city's chief magistrate, was chosen through an elaborate multi-round process of voting, drawing lots, and more voting.

Elections could be bought. Random draws were much harder to corrupt.

Rome

Not all uses of the lot were gentle. The Roman army practised decimatio: if a unit retreated in cowardice, every tenth soldier, chosen by lot, was executed by his own comrades. Random, fair in form, and absolutely brutal.

Modern juries

The jury selection systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, and a number of other common-law countries still use the lot at their core. Names are drawn at random from voter rolls or driving licence records. The randomness is treated as part of what makes a jury legitimate: a defendant cannot accuse a randomly selected jury of being hand-picked to convict, and a prosecutor cannot accuse it of being stacked to acquit. The lot is the trust mechanism, and the trust mechanism is the whole point.

The common thread

Every culture, every era, every continent arrived independently at the same conclusion. When people cannot agree, or when the stakes are too high for bias to be acceptable, a random draw is the fairest judge available.

The Greeks built machines for it. Koreans threw sticks into the sea. The Japanese shake bamboo at shrines. The Bible endorses it seventy-seven times.