A Proposal For Every Century

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

This marks the first occasion, incidentally, in which the transferred comments don’t fit in one Discourse post.

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2018-08-04 07:30:06 wrote

Tangential to Robert Houghton’s original query: How did this work in the “early days” of the Empire and its predecessors, before the advent of things like computers, the telegraph / telephone, and / or motorized transportation?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-08-04 12:32:02 wrote

Slowly, and well in advance.

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2018-08-05 07:05:21 wrote

…Can we get details?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-08-05 11:47:21 wrote

There really aren’t details to get. The sortition was just scheduled far enough ahead to allow for the slower speed of communication and travel, whether that meant farspeaker relays or heliographs or plain old neither-snow-nor-rain-nor-heat-nor-gloom-of-night messengers. That’s literally it.

It’s not like it’s an election where opinion changes affect the outcome, and people are long-lived. You could select the next dozen Senates in advance right now if you felt like it with minimal effect on functionality or outcomes.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-08-05 11:58:43 wrote

As for the sortition itself, in the days before better tech for getting genuine randomness was devised, Senators were chosen using the President of the Senate’s official, ceremonial, platinum-iridium d12.

(After its retirement in 1619, it has served subsequent Presidents as a paperweight, and occasionally in late-night games of Chimerae & Catacombs.)