Who receives an invitation to register?
The first step of a two-step democratic lottery is randomly selecting the people who will receive an invitation.
You may choose not to do this, and instead have an “open call” for registrations. The danger with an open call is that the people who will register will be the so called “usual suspects” – people who are more politically engaged and more used to sharing their opinions. An open call may not result in your pool of registered people containing a good cross section of society (and so will fail the test for being “representative”.)
There are three main ways that Sortition Foundation randomly selects the people who receive an invitation.
Post
In the UK, Australia, the US, Ireland and in several other countries, our preferred method is to send invitations by post. We use bespoke software to select addresses from national databases of postal addresses. E.g. in the UK we use the PAF.
If we are recruiting for an assembly of, say, X=50 people, we normally recommend sending out between 200x=10000 and 300X=15000 letters. This ensures that we get a good number of people in the pool so that we hit all of our targets.
By experience we know that we tend to get a lower response rate from people living in more deprived areas. As a result, in the UK our default is to weight our random selection so that more addresses go to houses with IMD scores 1 to 3.
Door knocking
In Europe, especially when we are running transnational democratic lotteries for the EU, we distribute invitations by door knocking. We run a network of door knocking teams across all 26 countries in the EU.
To use the method in, say, Poland, we first randomly select 10 locations across Poland. The random selection is weighted by population and is done in such a way that there are both urban and rural locations selected. Our teams then travel to each of the 10 locations and knock on doors until they have signed up a certain minimum number from each location.
Database
In situtations where the cost of printing and postage costs are prohibitive, we have another method of sending out invitations in the UK. Sortition Foundation maintains a database of all of the people who have registered their interest in previous events and have told us that they are happy for us to get in touch with them about any future events.
We can use this database to send out invitations to register interest. For instance, if a client wishes to run a democratic lottery for the population of Scotland, we can randomly select X number of people from our database who live in Scotland. We then email them and invite them to register their interest.