Voters Are the Problem — Why Juries Should Decide Elections
In an era of unprecedented information fragmentation, our democracy faces existential challenges. From the 1950s through the 1980s, when most Americans received their news from “Big Three” television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), we maintained a shared understanding of reality despite our political differences. The rise of cable news in the 1990s began to erode this consensus, and today’s landscape of social media and partisan news sources, each carefully crafted to confirm existing biases, has shattered this common ground. As hostile foreign states weaponize this fragmentation and artificial intelligence accelerates the spread of misinformation, we must ask whether traditional democratic structures can withstand these pressures.
Two Fundamental Requirements for Effective Governance
Any system for collective decision-making must satisfy two fundamental requirements to create effective policy:
- Alignment: The decision-makers must broadly represent the interests and values of the entire population.
- Capability: The decision-makers must have sufficient ability to make good choices. This breaks down into two components:
- Knowledge: Access to and understanding of relevant facts, policy implications, and real-world outcomes
- Intelligence: The ability to effectively process and apply that knowledge to make sound judgments
The Crisis in Our Current System
Our democracy struggles with both requirements. The alignment problem is clear: voter turnout consistently skews toward older, whiter, and wealthier demographics than the general population. This means our decision-makers poorly represent the actual public.
The capability challenge is even more severe. Voters show shocking levels of misunderstanding about even basic national facts — for instance, Americans on average believe that 21% of the population is transgender (actual: 1%) and 41% is Black (actual: 12%). If voters are this disconnected from basic demographic reality, how can they possibly assess complex policies?
Meanwhile, our sound-bite driven campaign process emphasizes charisma over substance, preventing voters from effectively identifying capable candidates. Instead of evaluating actual capability, voting defaults to personality-based tribal affiliations. We’re selecting leaders based on charm and identity rather than their ability to govern effectively.
The Search for Solutions
One seemingly logical response would be to restrict voting to more educated and intelligent citizens. Why not limit the franchise to college professors or other educated professionals who better understand policy implications?
This suggestion, while well-intentioned, fails on multiple levels. Beyond the obvious problem of demographic skews, it suffers from a fundamental game theory problem: give all power to professors, and those seeking power will simply redefine what constitutes a “professor.”
Indeed, any attempt to filter voters based on education, knowledge tests, or other merit-based criteria inevitably raises the question: who designs the filters? Who watches the watchers? History shows that such systems are invariably corrupted to serve those already in power.
A Different Approach
What if, instead of trying to filter out “bad” voters, we focused on making all voters better informed? What if every voter had to hear directly from all candidates about their positions and policies in an impartial process? And what if, to fix demographic skews, voting was mandatory?
This would address our alignment problem through mandatory participation. It would also address the knowledge component of capability through structured information sharing. But what about intelligence? Here’s where something fascinating happens: when personality politics and charisma are stripped away in favor of substantive deliberation, voters can better identify and select our most intelligent candidates. The jury setting, by emphasizing facts over charm, creates an environment where genuine capability rises to the surface. While no system is perfect, this approach avoids the fatal flaw of standard aptitude metrics: their inevitable corruption by those seeking power.
But this presents an obvious practical challenge: we can’t shut down society for a week while everyone participates in lengthy deliberations.
The Statistical Solution
Here mathematics offers an elegant answer: random sampling. Statistical analysis shows that a surprisingly small group of randomly selected citizens can accurately represent what the entire population would choose if similarly informed. Even with just a few dozen jurors, we can achieve high confidence that their decision reflects what the broader public would choose under the same conditions.
Election by Jury: A Practical Implementation
This brings us to a compelling synthesis: election by jury. By randomly selecting a small group of citizens — similar to our current jury system — we can create a practical system that solves our fundamental problems:
- Perfect demographic representation through random selection and mandatory participation
- Better knowledge through structured deliberation
- Better use of intelligence by creating an environment where facts and careful reasoning take precedence over charisma — research shows that even voters of average intelligence are remarkably good at identifying capable candidates when personality and tribal affiliations are stripped away
- Protection against corruption through established jury selection and protection mechanisms
- Dramatic cost reduction by eliminating the need for massive campaign spending
The jury size would scale not with population but with the resources available for tampering. Presidential elections would need larger juries than local ones because the incentives for tampering are greater. Combined with secret balloting, this makes it prohibitively expensive to bribe or coerce enough jurors to swing an election.
Conclusion
As our traditional democratic systems strain under modern pressures, election by jury offers a practical path forward. By combining random selection with structured deliberation, we can achieve both better representation and more capable decision-making. Rather than trying to filter for perfect voters — an impossible task — we can create a system that helps normal citizens make better decisions through better processes.
Additional Thoughts
Here’s a provocative question worth considering: should the principles of election by jury — particularly secret balloting — extend to our elected officials’ votes on legislation? While the idea of secret voting by representatives might seem to promote conscience-driven decisions free from external pressure, the reality is more complex. Secret voting can actually enable corruption by shielding legislators from accountability. As research has shown, transparency in voting records plays a crucial role in democratic accountability. Perhaps the solution to money’s influence lies elsewhere than in secrecy.
Note: Statistical calculations and demographic data cited in this article are drawn from research available at www.electionbyjury.org.
