Terry Bouricius was a third-party candidate for the Vermont Liberty Union Party, then the Citizens' Party, and was elected to the Burlington City Council along with Bernie Sanders in 1981. He later served a decade as a Progressive Party member of the Vermont House of Representatives and has written extensively about democracy reform, with a focus on sortition as an alternative to elections.
Americans are frustrated with our increasingly oligarchic political system. Selecting an assortment of lawmaking deliberative bodies through random lotteries could help fix it, by empowering ordinary people rather than unaccountable politicians.