Citizen random sortition in Cedric Villani's Paris campaign candidate list

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In the fall of 2019, we, Open Source Politics were requested by Paula Forteza (the French MEP reknown for its stands on open source and civic tech experiments) to help the Cedric Villani campaign for the Paris municipal election to provide a digital system that would the backbone of secure and transparent sortition process where regular citizens would candidate to make it into the candidate list in every district of Paris. The result is an epic adventure with many challenges leading up to this : https://candidater.cedricvillani.paris

We used the Decidim open source framework to verify citizens identity, gather their application and then organize a sortition with several rounds and many constraints (parity, position on the list, district base).

In the end we were able to do the whole process thanks to the energy and dedication of the campaign team and volunteers who tirelessly recruited candidate, and met them between sortition round to ensure of their identities. The stakes were quite high as Cedric Villani poled up to 20% in intended votes and the positions on the candidates list for the randomly selected citizen candidate were quite high (3rd place in some cases, which meant great possibilities to be elected).

We had the chance to know in person the randomly selected candidate and met incredible individuals which input in the campaign brought so much freshness.

The experience might have been the first of its kind and really brought disruption to political campaign when most commonly it's can of worms.