NOTE: A password is required to attend this virtual event. Please contact Mercy Corredor at mcorredo@umich.edu or Sumeet Patwardhan at sumeetcp@umich.edu to request the passcode.

In this talk, I argue that electoral representative systems face two fundamental obstacles. One obstacle concerns political equality. I suggest that, in an important sense, it is impossible to distribute political power equally through electoral representative democracy under most modern political conditions. The second obstacle concerns epistemic quality. I argue that electoral representative systems will tend to do poorly at drawing on all the politically relevant knowledge held by the members of the political communities in which they exist. I argue that these two considerations, among others, should incline us toward taking seriously the use of random selection of political representatives. I present one such system for doing so--what I call the "lottocratic" system--and discuss how it might fare better in terms of both political equality and epistemic quality. Along the way, I also suggest a way of situating the idea of "identity politics" in a moral theory of politics. In the talk, I draw on and engage with the work of Lani Guinier, John Hart Ely, Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, Charles Mills, and Alison Wylie, among others.