Venice picked its head of state with ten rounds of a lottery
For over 500 years, choosing the Doge meant alternating between random draws and committee votes — a system built specifically so no family could rig it.
Venice was a republic ruled by merchants who trusted almost nothing more than they distrusted each other. By the 13th century, the great families of the city had watched enough elections get captured by factions and bribery that they designed something almost absurdly elaborate to stop it happening to the office of Doge, their head of state.
The 1268 procedure, in force until the republic fell in 1797, worked like this: thirty members of the Great Council were chosen by lot. Those thirty were narrowed to nine, again by lot. The nine selected forty by vote. The forty were cut to twelve by lot. Those twelve chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were cut to nine by lot. The nine chose forty-five. The forty-five were cut to eleven by lot. And those eleven finally elected the forty-one electors who chose the Doge — requiring at least twenty-five of their votes to win.
Ten alternating rounds of chance and choice, layered on top of each other, for one job. It looks like bureaucratic madness. It was actually a defense: any family rich enough to bribe one round of electors couldn't possibly predict, let alone buy, who would survive nine more rounds of a genuine lottery.
Modern election law tries to solve capture with disclosure rules and spending limits. Venice solved it by making the process itself too random for money to reliably grab hold of.