Pretty radical idea, Tom...which is pretty funny, in context, isn't it?

At first I thought you meant picking the actual representatives at random, but then I figured out you meant candidates. That's not bad, since the voters could still weed out the completely unqualified.

The 13th Amendment against slavery and involuntary servitude has been interpreted as having a gaping loophole exempting the government, so as to allow for the military draft. Could be extended to serving in the government or being an involuntary candidate, I guess.

The idea's not perfect, though. In order for the voters to make an intelligent choice, you'd have to publish information about the candidates. Total invasion of privacy, especially given the level of scrutiny to which we've become accustomed the last few decades. If you let the candidates write their own bios, who fact-checks? What about campaigning? I don't think you could eliminate it, because the draftees could legitimately argue that as long as they've been drafted, they at least have a right to speak, and the voters have a right to hear them. And then you'd end up with 100% government financing of campaigns, since to make the draftees pay for their own campaigns would be confiscation of their wealth.

I'm not so sure it's as good an idea as it seemed at first. We could always go to simply conscripting the representatives directly. Maybe to offset the certainty of randomly picking idiots, the size of the chamber should be increased, maybe to a thousand or more. Still the same percentage of idiots, but each one would have individually less influence.