Sortition and election are both ways of scaling democracy to populations too large to effectively use direct democracy alone; neither is any closer to direct democracy, and it seems to me that each can be viewed as mitigating the distortions imposed by the other (as our system -- in the US, but the same is true in most modern democracies -- tends to use election much more than sortition, it may be that it could be improved by increased use of sortition,)