Community Questions

(Question paraphrased from this blog post received 2/27/26 via email)

First, thank you! Randomness and fairness are critical for Akron’s Civic Lottery, and we welcome questions and careful scrutiny.

The Akron lottery was built around two main goals:

Goal 1: Representation — The final group of 65 people should reflect the community. This means the group should match the city’s makeup across key demographics like age, race, gender, and political affiliation.

Goal 2: Equal Chances — Everyone who signed up should have as fair a chance as possible to be selected.

Of course, not every demographic signed up in equal numbers. Some groups had more people sign up, and other groups had fewer hand-raisers. From groups where there weren't as many hand-raisers, the Panelot system pulled those people into more panels. 

This is how Panelot makes sure each panel is representative of the community, even when every demographic group in the community doesn't sign up in equal numbers.

In the Unify Akron Civic Lottery, each participant had a chance of being selected. And every possible panel in the lottery meets the representation goals.

On average, each person had a 13% chance of selection. The minimum chance of selection was 4% and the maximum chance was 51%.

Here’s what that final panel looked like.

Here are the anonymized datasets, if you’d like to explore the data:

• The complete list of pool members (represented by unique numeric identifiers)

  • Note: We had 584 applications to the Civic Lottery. Applicants outside of the City of Akron and applicants who indicated on the form that they could not make the times of the Civic Assembly meetings were removed from the pool. 

• The list of 1000 panels that could have been chosen in the lottery, where each panel is represented by the list of pool member identifiers it contains

Was the process properly explained during the Lottery event? Probably not. The Unify Akron Team got some helpful feedback after the Civic Lottery that the process was confusing. We agree. The explanation of identifying 6 numbers and then choosing 1 of those wasn’t well explained. We acknowledge how our presentation could have been confusing and will fix that at future Civic Lottery events.

We also got some helpful critiques on our use of rubber ducks. At the Civic Lottery, we used 10 ducks (numbered 0 to 9), and the process of scrambling the ducks manually is inferior to processes like the state lottery runs (using air machines with balls).

The Unify Akron team used the ducks in an attempt to make the event more community-oriented and fun. And as the critique suggested, it is possible that the ducks might not have been thoroughly scrambled each time. We understand why our approach might have raised some questions and concerns.

The most important goal was to make sure everyone could see that the selection of the final panel, and therefore Delegates, could not have been rigged. No one got to decide who was in this Assembly and who wasn’t. It was, indeed, left to chance, which in this case, may have included the chance ways the children imperfectly mixed the ducks.

Read the full response from Panelot here.