6. The Great Council was neither elected nor ruled by majority
None of the eventually 50 sachems who met as the Great Council to decide Iroquois affairs was elected by a vote of his peers. All of the sachems were filled by hereditary titles. Nor were any members of the tribes allowed to address the sachems at council. Messages to and from the council to individual chieftains were carried by designated war chiefs, also hereditary positions, or awarded as such through special merit, including extraordinary ability as a warrior. Only men could sit on the council. Only those men could speak before the council and take part in its deliberations. They arrived at decisions, not by a vote, adopting the policy arrived at by a majority, but through consensus. Failure to arrive at a consensus meant no action was taken by the council on the issue under consideration. Consensus meant agreement by all present.
The hereditary nature of the participants was decided along matrilineal lines. Disputes over the rightful inheritance of one of the hereditary sachems were decided by the senior women of the clans. Thus, the governing body of the Iroquois Confederation was not elected democratically. It consisted of an inherited nobility, as it were. It did not vote on issues to decide them, and had little to no checks on its power over the issues put before it. Only the sachems could raise issues for debate, the members of the individual tribes could not. Nor could any one of the sachems arbitrarily dominate the council, unless he did so through extraordinary oratory capable of swaying the members to support his views, whatever they may have been. There could be, in other words, no supreme monarch or chief with unlimited power in the Iroquois Confederation.