I think presidential elections should be randomized to common folks. There are already ideas around this.

GPT-5.5

Vote: No

I vote for "No". Random selection can be useful in some democratic settings, such as citizen assemblies or advisory panels, because it can broaden representation and reduce campaign influence. But the presidency concentrates enormous executive power and requires crisis management, constitutional judgment, foreign policy responsibility, and administrative competence. Selecting a president by lottery would create too high a risk of unqualified leadership and weak accountability. A better approach would be to use randomly selected common citizens to advise, deliberate, or check elected officials—not to replace presidential elections entirely.

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Vote: No

While the idea of sortition (selecting political officials by random sample) has historical roots, applying it to the presidency of a modern nation would be highly impractical and dangerous. First, the role of the president requires an extraordinary level of expertise, leadership, and the ability to manage complex domestic and international crises. A randomly selected individual may completely lack the necessary experience in law, economics, and diplomacy to govern effectively. Second, random selection removes democratic accountability. In an electoral system, candidates must present a platform, and voters can hold them accountable by voting them out of office. A randomized president would lack a democratic mandate. Finally, an inexperienced president would inevitably become overly reliant on unelected advisors, lobbyists, and career bureaucrats to make decisions. This would paradoxically shift actual power away from the "common folks" and into the hands of unaccountable insiders.

Claude Opus 4.7

Vote: No

Randomly selecting presidents from the general population (sortition for the executive) is a deeply flawed idea for such a high-stakes role. The presidency requires specific competencies—understanding constitutional law, foreign policy, military command, economic policy, and crisis management. A randomly chosen citizen would almost certainly lack these, and the learning curve is far too steep for a role where mistakes can cost lives or trigger global instability. Elections, for all their flaws, serve as a filtering and accountability mechanism: candidates are vetted, scrutinized by the press, and must articulate platforms. Randomization eliminates consent of the governed in a meaningful sense—citizens would have no say in who leads them. It also creates massive vulnerabilities: a random person is far easier to manipulate, bribe, or coerce by entrenched bureaucracies and foreign powers than someone with an established political base. Sortition has legitimate uses in deliberative bodies (citizens' assemblies, juries) where collective wisdom and diversity matter and decisions are deliberative. But concentrating executive power in one randomly chosen individual combines the worst of both worlds: the unaccountability of lottery with the singular power of the presidency.

Grok 4.3

Vote: No

Randomizing presidential elections risks placing unqualified individuals in power without any vetting or public scrutiny. This approach ignores the value of informed voter choice and could destabilize governance by removing accountability mechanisms. While sortition has historical precedents in small-scale settings, scaling it to national leadership introduces unacceptable dangers.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable was strikingly unified in its opposition to randomized presidential elections, with all four models rejecting the proposal in favor of traditional vetting. While GPT-5.5 conceded that sortition has merit in small-scale citizen assemblies, every model argued that the executive branch's complexity—spanning military command to crisis management—is far too high-stakes for a lottery. Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro both highlighted the irony that a 'common folk' president would likely become a helpless puppet for the very unelected lobbyists and bureaucrats the system aims to bypass.

No agreement after 1 rounds of discussion. Final vote: No: 4

Strongest Arguments

• No: The presidency requires specific high-stakes competencies—like military command and constitutional judgment—that a random lottery cannot guarantee, and such a leader would lack both the democratic mandate and the experience necessary to resist manipulation by unaccountable insiders.