Democratic Lottery for Board of Directors

Board of Directors

The following democratic-lottery-selected individuals have agreed to be on the Board of Directors for Democracy Without Elections.

• Michael Miller, Renton, Washington
• David Grant, Baltimore, Maryland
• Chris Forman, Chicago, Illinois
• Drew Penrose, Silver Spring, Maryland
• Jonathan Crock, Washington, DC
• Erik Carter, White Plains, New York
• Don Ferris, Sahuarita, Arizona

• Brian Shelton, Alexandria, Virginia

• Edward Morgan, Austin, Texas

The Selection Process

The membership of the organization voted on 13 September 2020 to create a Board of Directors. The motion that passed follows.

Democracy Without Elections establish a 9 member Board of Directors who are selected using a democratic lottery. They serve a staggered 18 month term so that every 6 months 3 members leave the Board and 3 are selected using a democratic lottery. A member leaving the Board may not serve on the Board again during the next term, but may enter subsequent lotteries.

The first selected Board shall decide among themselves the 3 members who will serve 6 months, the 3 members who will serve 12 months, and the 3 for 18 months.

The Board shall use deliberation techniques to operate.

The democratic lottery shall use as the basis of the selection all members of the organization.

The Chapter authorized the Coordinating Committee to set up the democratic lottery. Our Convener, Owen Shaffer, decided not to participate in the lottery selection, and the Committee appointed him to manage the selection.

The selection occurred online at 3pm Eastern on 18 October. Owen was accompanied by Philipp Verpoort (a Director of the Sortition Foundation living in the United Kingdom) to do the selection. The results of the selection are shown in the table.

While the privacy of individuals is maintained, you should be able to find yourself in the table. Consider your email address that you used to join the organization. Put the fourth, fifth, sixth and ninth character of your email together and find it in the table. Select # is the position in the democratic lottery that each was selected.

As individuals are contacted (Contact date) and individuals choose to be on the Board (Said yes), the table will be updated. Each person is given 3 days to respond to the email inviting them to join the Board.

Elected Boards in other organizations are able to identify their Directors shortly after the election is over because those standing for the elected position have already agreed to serve if elected. A democratic-lottery-selected Board is different, however. No one was pre-qualified to be in the selection, so time must be given to selected individuals to determine if they want to be on the Board.

A video recording of the democratic lottery for the selection of the Directors is here.