Sortition is the selection of officials or jurors by lottery rather than election. Classical Athens filled most public offices this way, using a stone allotment machine called a kleroterion, on the theory that random selection resisted corruption and gave every eligible citizen an equal share of power.

ERNIE (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment) was the machine built in 1957 to draw winners for the UK's Premium Bonds, designed at the Post Office Research Station by a team including WWII codebreaking engineers. Early versions generated randomness from physical noise in neon tubes; the current generation uses quantum effects.

Why did people trust drawing lots?

Because the process was visible and nobody controlled the outcome. A lot drawn from a shaken container in front of witnesses can't be quietly steered by any participant — the same transparency principle behind modern lottery ball machines and screen-recorded online draws.

Do modern systems still use physical randomness?

Yes. National lotteries still use mechanical ball machines for televised credibility, hardware random number generators sample electrical noise inside CPUs, and Cloudflare famously films a wall of lava lamps to seed part of its encryption randomness. Physical entropy remains the root of all trustworthy digital randomness.

Drawing Lots to Browser Entropy: A Short History of Fair Random Selection

Every culture that ever had to divide land, assign duties, or pick one person from many discovered the same solution: take the decision out of human hands entirely. The tools changed — pebbles, straws, brass drums, neon tubes, lava lamps — but the idea behind them is three thousand years old and hasn't changed at all.

By the FairPick team · Published June 11, 2026

Lots, Straws, and Stones: The Ancient World

Casting lots is one of the oldest decision technologies on record. Mesopotamian and Hebrew texts describe lots used to divide inheritance and assign temple duties; Homer has Greek heroes shake marked tokens in a helmet to decide who faces Hector. The mechanics were simple — distinguishable objects in a container, shaken, drawn blind — but the social function was sophisticated: when the outcome belongs to chance (or, as most ancient cultures framed it, to the gods), no family can resent another for the result.

Classical Athens industrialized the idea. Most public offices and all jury panels were filled by lottery, a system called sortition, because Athenians considered elections corruptible — the rich could campaign — while the lot gave every eligible citizen literally equal odds. They even built a machine for it: the kleroterion, a stone slab with a grid of slots for citizens' bronze ID tickets and a tube down the side. White and black balls poured down the tube selected or rejected entire rows at once, in public, where everyone could watch. It is, functionally, the ancestor of every transparent draw since: fixed entries, a visible mechanism, and a result no official could steer.

Drawing straws, the version that survived in everyday life, works on the same logic with zero equipment — one short straw hidden in a fistful of long ones. Roman soldiers diced for cloaks; medieval villages drew lots for strip-field allocations; ship crews in extremis drew lots for the worst duties imaginable. Wherever stakes were high and trust was low, chance was the only judge everyone would accept.

Wheels and Drums: Randomness Becomes a Spectacle

The Italian city-states of the Renaissance turned the lot into public finance. Genoa's lottery — drawing five names from ninety to fill city offices — became so popular as a betting opportunity that it evolved into the number lottery still echoed in modern lotto formats. With money on the line, the drawing mechanism itself became the guarantee of honesty: numbered balls in a rotating cage or drum, mixed in full view of the crowd, drawn by a blindfolded child (chosen precisely because a child was assumed to have no stake and no skill to cheat).

This is the era that gave random selection its theater — and the theater was load-bearing. A spinning drum doesn't just produce a fair result; it produces a result that a thousand spectators can verify is fair with their own eyes. Bingo cages, raffle tumblers, carnival prize wheels, and televised lottery machines are all descendants of this insight. It's also why a modern spinning wheel remains the most trusted way to make a random pick in front of a group: the suspense isn't decoration, it's evidence.

The Machine Age: When Randomness Got Hard

The twentieth century needed randomness at industrial scale — for statistics, simulations, cryptography, and national savings schemes — and discovered how hard it is to manufacture.

A million random digits

In 1955 the RAND Corporation published A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates — a 400-page book of nothing but random numbers, generated from an electronic roulette wheel, because scientists had no better source to share. It became one of the strangest bestsellers in publishing history.

ERNIE

Britain's Premium Bonds needed millions of fair draws a month, so in 1957 the Post Office Research Station built ERNIE — Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment — which harvested randomness from electrical noise in neon tubes. Its descendants run today; the current ERNIE generates randomness from quantum effects in light.

The draft lottery lesson

The 1969 US draft lottery mixed birthdate capsules in a box — insufficiently. December dates, added last and mixed least, were drawn early at statistically impossible rates. It became the textbook case that physical mixing can fail quietly, and that fairness needs verification, not just good intentions.

Lava lamps

Cloudflare, which secures a large share of web traffic, points a camera at a wall of lava lamps in its San Francisco lobby and feeds the chaotic images into its encryption seeding. A deliberately photogenic reminder that the physical world is still the deepest well of unpredictability.

The draft lottery story deserves the emphasis. For three thousand years, "shake the container well" was the entire integrity model of random selection — and in 1969, on the most consequential lottery in American history, it visibly failed. The fix in 1970 involved statisticians, calibrated procedures, and published verification. Randomness had become an engineering discipline.

Browser Entropy: The Kleroterion in Your Pocket

Today the chain of trust runs from physics to your screen. Your device's processor samples thermal and electrical noise; the operating system mixes those measurements with timing jitter from your keystrokes and network into an entropy pool; a cryptographically secure generator stretches that pool into unlimited unpredictable output; and the browser exposes it to web pages as crypto.getRandomValues() — the API behind FairPick's picking tools and the encryption keys protecting your email. (Our explainer on how random number generators work walks through each link in that chain.)

What's striking is how little the requirements have changed since Athens. A fair selection process still needs the same three things the kleroterion delivered: fixed entries that everyone can inspect before the draw, a mechanism nobody controls, and a result everyone can witness. The stone slab became a screen recording; the bronze tickets became a pasted list; the tumbling balls became hardware entropy. The trust model is identical.

And the old tools haven't died — they've specialized. Courts still empanel juries by lot. Ireland and France have convened citizens' assemblies chosen by sortition, the full Athenian idea returning after 2,400 years. National lotteries keep their mechanical ball machines because a televised tumbling drum convinces an audience in a way no algorithm audit ever will. Humans, it turns out, don't just need randomness to be fair. They need to watch it being fair — and that has been true since the first lot rattled in a clay pot.

Questions

History FAQs.

Why was a blindfolded child used to draw lottery numbers?

As a living impartiality guarantee: a child was presumed to have no financial stake, no allies among the bettors, and no sleight-of-hand skill. Several lotteries kept the tradition into the modern era purely because audiences trusted it.

Did sortition really run a whole government?

Most of one. Athens filled its Council of 500, juries, and the majority of magistracies by lot from eligible volunteer citizens, with short terms and audits. Generals and treasurers — roles needing specific skill — were still elected, a chance-versus-skill division any modern giveaway host would recognize.

What actually went wrong in the 1969 draft lottery?

Birthdate capsules were added to the box month by month and mixed too gently, so late-year dates stayed near the top and were drawn disproportionately early. Statisticians flagged the skew within weeks; the 1970 draw used randomized procedures designed with statistical oversight.

Is a physical draw fairer than a digital one?

A well-run digital draw is statistically at least as fair, and far easier to repeat and audit. The physical draw's advantage is purely persuasive: spectators can verify it with their eyes alone. The best modern practice borrows both — cryptographic randomness, performed visibly (projected, streamed, or screen-recorded).

Three Thousand Years Later…

Fixed entries, a mechanism nobody controls, a result everyone can watch. Same idea, faster wheel.

🎡 Spin the Wheel →