RANDOM TAKES BALTIMORE imagines a political option for the not-too-distant future.

Hoping to be a forerunner in assuring that its city council be as statistically representative of the population as possible, the city of Baltimore chooses its city council by random selection.

The fifteen new council members — untested ‘ordinary citizens’ — must struggle to maintain this Peoples Platform against an uprising from the former powers-that-be. The council faces bribery attempts, a smear campaign and eventually a full-blown attempt to cut the city off from the rest of the state.

“Random Takes Baltimore” is a municipal version of my “Random Takes Off” (which considers using sortition on a national level).  Although spiced by elements of absurdist satire and purposefully stretched to the limits of plausibility, the fact is that the use of sortition is more likely to spread in a piecemeal and local progression as provoked in “Random Takes Baltimore”

See https://buff.ly/2FSHFP1 for my publications about sortition in several different genres and formats.