Election by Jury: The Ultimate Democratic Safeguard in the Age of AI and Information Warfare

As we stand at the precipice of a new technological era, our democratic institutions face unprecedented challenges. Advanced artificial intelligence systems, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and emergent Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), have unleashed powerful new tools for information manipulation that are already being deployed against electoral systems worldwide. Social media platforms and partisan news networks create hermetically sealed echo chambers where citizens consume increasingly narrow information diets. Meanwhile, sophisticated foreign actors deploy coordinated information warfare campaigns designed to exploit these vulnerabilities and undermine democratic legitimacy.

The threats to democratic decision-making have intensified dramatically in recent years. Russia, China, and Iran actively target U.S. elections with AI-powered disinformation operations that U.S. intelligence officials consider "the most active foreign threat to our elections." Generative AI has reduced the cost and increased the effectiveness of these campaigns to such an extent that even domestic actors now pose a major threat to election integrity. The combination of widespread misperceptions and rapidly advancing AI capabilities creates an existential danger to democratic processes that traditional safeguards can no longer adequately address.

This convergence of technological revolution and information chaos demands a fundamental reimagining of democratic safeguards. Election by jury—a system where randomly selected citizens deliberate and make electoral decisions on behalf of the wider population—offers such a solution.

Introduction: The Twin Pillars of Democratic Decision-Making

Any decision-making system must satisfy two fundamental requirements to function effectively:

1. Alignment: The decision-makers' interests must genuinely align with those of the population they represent.

2. Competence: The decision-makers must have sufficient information and reasoning capacity to make good decisions. As the old proverb reminds us, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" - alignment of interests alone is insufficient if decision-makers lack the capability to translate those aligned interests into effective outcomes.

Election by jury optimizes for both of these requirements in ways that traditional electoral systems cannot match, particularly in our current information ecosystem. By examining the theoretical underpinnings, historical precedents, empirical evidence, and practical implementation of election by jury, we can understand why this approach represents a critical democratic advance for our time.

The Alignment Problem

The concept of alignment is central to both democratic theory and the emerging field of AI safety. In democratic governance, alignment refers to the degree to which decision-makers' interests correspond with those of the wider population. When alignment fails, representatives may pursue agendas that benefit themselves or special interests at the expense of the public good.

Traditional electoral systems attempt to create alignment through accountability mechanisms—primarily regular elections that allow voters to remove representatives who fail to serve their interests. However, this mechanism has proven increasingly vulnerable to manipulation through sophisticated campaign techniques exploiting cognitive biases, structural rules that insulate incumbents, dark money operations that distort accountability, and fractured information environments that hinder voter assessment.

The introduction of advanced AI systems further exacerbates these vulnerabilities by enabling hyper-targeted persuasion, synthetic media manipulation, personalized content at massive scale, and algorithmic influence that shapes preferences without detection—creating an unprecedented challenge to electoral accountability.

A particularly significant vulnerability in current electoral systems is the overwhelming influence of money. Candidates must raise substantial funds primarily to achieve name recognition through advertising and media exposure, which creates a systemic advantage for wealthy candidates or those with access to donor networks. This financial barrier effectively excludes many qualified potential leaders and distorts representation by favoring those with connections to affluent donors and special interests.

Within this context, traditional electoral accountability becomes increasingly insufficient as an alignment mechanism. The randomly selected citizen jury, by contrast, achieves what can be mathematically demonstrated as optimal alignment while significantly reducing the influence of money in politics.

Random selection provides a form of alignment that is mathematically optimal compared to any other selection method. When we randomly select a statistically significant sample of citizens, we create a microcosm of society that represents the full spectrum of interests, perspectives, and demographics within the wider population.

Election by jury further democratizes access by providing each candidate with equal time to present their case directly to jurors. This structural equality largely nullifies the advantage of financial resources in the communication phase of the campaign. A compelling candidate with limited resources would have the same opportunity to make their case as a wealthy one—a sharp contrast to our current system where many qualified potential candidates never gain traction simply due to fundraising challenges.

Randomly selected citizens have no systemic interest divergence from the population they represent because they are a perfect statistical representation of that population. This statistical alignment makes random selection uniquely resistant to manipulation and corruption.

This principle is particularly important in light of the severe demographic biases in current electoral participation. According to research from Pew Research Center, there are significant disparities between groups' representation in the eligible voter population versus the actual voter population. Adults under 50 constitute 64% of eligible voters but only 36% of actual voters. White Americans make up 55% of eligible voters but 75% of actual voters. Hispanic and Black Americans together represent 33% of eligible voters but only 18% of actual voters. These disparities create a systematic bias in electoral outcomes that fails to represent the full spectrum of citizen interests.

Some might object that jury systems themselves aren't perfect, as certain individuals may receive exemptions or find ways to avoid service. This is a legitimate concern worth addressing. Across the United States, typical grounds for exemption or deferral from jury service include being above a certain age (often 65-75), being a full-time student, serving as a primary caregiver for young children or disabled family members, having a documented medical condition that would prevent service, or being on active military duty. Some states also exempt certain professionals like physicians, first responders, or sole proprietors of small businesses. While failing to respond to a jury summons can lead to fines or being held in contempt of court, enforcement practices vary considerably across jurisdictions.

Research on the demographic impact of these exemptions is limited, but available evidence suggests that the resulting statistical disparities would likely be considerably smaller than the dramatic differences seen in electoral turnout. Current electoral participation shows a 28 percentage point underrepresentation of citizens under 50 and a 15 percentage point underrepresentation of Hispanic and Black Americans. While jury service avoidance might introduce some skew, it would be unlikely to approach these magnitudes of distortion given the more limited and specific nature of jury exemptions compared to the widespread self-selection bias in voting.

It's important to note several additional factors that further minimize demographic impacts of jury exemptions. First, many jury exemptions represent deferrals rather than permanent excusals. For example, full-time students might defer service until breaks or after graduation rather than being permanently excluded. Furthermore, most jurisdictions have time-limited exemption periods—typically one to three years following service—after which individuals return to the selection pool with the same probability as everyone else. As the HowStuffWorks article on jury service explains, "once you report for service, your name is pulled from the jury pool for at least the next 12 months... If you actually serve, you are exempt from jury duty for the next two or three years, depending on the state. After that, you're tossed back in the mix." This approach ensures that over time, the burden of jury service is distributed across the population, even if some groups receive more temporary exemptions than others. Second, not everyone within an eligible exemption category (such as those over 65 or full-time students) will actually request or be granted exemptions, further reducing demographic distortion.

An Election by Jury system could further improve demographic representation by implementing a time-weighted selection algorithm rather than the current binary exclusion approach. The guiding principle is simple: two people who live for the same number of years should, in expectation, serve jury duty the same number of times. This fundamental fairness ensures that temporary deferrals don't disproportionately exempt anyone from their civic responsibility.

Additionally, an election by jury system would not require voir dire (the process of questioning prospective jurors to identify and remove those with potential biases), which is a major source of demographic skew in trial juries. While bias exemptions are appropriate in criminal trials where impartiality toward the defendant is essential, they would be unnecessary in electoral juries where the task is precisely to represent the full spectrum of perspectives and interests in the population. This further reduces concerns about demographic distortion in election by jury compared to both conventional voting and trial juries.

Some reformers have proposed compulsory voting as a solution to demographic representation issues. While universal participation would indeed eliminate selection bias, it offers negligible statistical advantages over a properly sized random sample. More importantly, compulsory voting lacks what makes election by jury truly transformative: the capacity for deliberative depth that enhances decision quality. This leads us to the second pillar of effective democratic decision-making: competence.

The Competence Problem

The current information environment is driving Americans further apart by creating what researchers call the "Perception Gap" – a profound misunderstanding of compatriots across the political divide. A major study by More in Common found that Americans have "a deeply distorted understanding of each other," with Democrats and Republicans imagining "almost twice as many of their political opponents as reality hold views they consider 'extreme'".

This distortion extends beyond political views to basic demographic facts. A YouGov study found Americans consistently misperceive the size of nearly every demographic group, including religious minorities, racial groups, and socioeconomic classes. Perhaps most counterintuitively, the More in Common research reveals that increased news consumption and political engagement often worsens these misperceptions rather than improving them. People who reported reading the news "most of the time" had nearly three times more distorted perceptions of political opponents than those who read news only occasionally, suggesting our fragmented information ecosystem may actually reduce accurate understanding rather than enhance it.

The combination of widespread misperceptions and the rapid advancement of AI-powered information manipulation creates a particularly dangerous environment for democratic decision-making. Beyond state actors, the reduced cost of producing convincing disinformation means that domestic actors are considered a major threat to election integrity.

Generative AI has dramatically reduced the cost and increased the effectiveness of disinformation campaigns. The U.S. intelligence community has identified numerous ways AI enhances influence operations, including AI-enhanced content proving more influential than fully generated content, fake audio being more effective than fake video, and impersonations of lesser-known individuals working better than those of prominent leaders.

This challenge may intensify even more rapidly than anticipated. The AI-2027 project, published in April 2025 and led by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo and Astral Codex Ten's Scott Alexander, forecasts that AI development could accelerate dramatically in the coming years, with "coding agents" becoming "good enough to substantially boost AI R&D itself, causing an intelligence explosion that plows through the human level sometime in mid-2027." Their detailed month-by-month scenario identifies several concerning capabilities that could emerge, including "superhuman forecasting, superpersuasion, and AI negotiation" techniques that would further erode the already fragile information environment that traditional democratic mechanisms rely upon.

Russia, China, and Iran are actively targeting U.S. elections with increasingly sophisticated AI-powered disinformation operations. According to U.S. intelligence officials, "Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections," using its "vast multimedia influence apparatus" to erode trust in American democratic institutions and exacerbate sociopolitical divisions, as stated in congressional testimony. In February 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a Russian state-affiliated entity for conducting a sophisticated GenAI-based disinformation operation targeting the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, using deepfakes and AI tools to sow discord, according to the Treasury Department.

These operations have become alarmingly sophisticated. Microsoft researchers identified a Russian influence operation called Storm-1516 that successfully launders anti-Ukraine narratives to U.S. audiences through a three-stage process: creating content with supposed "whistleblowers," pushing it through covert websites, and finally having it amplified by Russian expats and officials.

The intelligence community considers AI a "malign influence accelerant" that enables foreign adversaries to quickly and more convincingly tailor polarizing content aimed at swaying American voters, as detailed in an ODNI memo. As one intelligence official noted, "information operations are the threat, and AI is the enabler."

The jury model recognizes that competence isn't merely an inherent quality but can be dramatically enhanced through proper process and information environment. The election by jury approach transforms ordinary citizens into competent decision-makers by providing:

• Protected time for learning and consideration, free from work and daily responsibilities

• Access to comprehensive, balanced information about candidates and issues from multiple perspectives

• Expert testimony and direct questioning of candidates

• Structured deliberation with diverse peers that enhances critical thinking

• A controlled environment that protects jurors from external influence and manipulation

Research in deliberative democracy consistently demonstrates that ordinary citizens, when provided with these resources, can develop sophisticated understanding of complex issues and make reasoned judgments that experts find credible and well-justified. This deliberative environment specifically counters modern information threats by helping participants distinguish reliable information from manipulation, breaking through filter bubbles, and promoting reasoned argument rather than emotional manipulation.

This deliberative advantage is a core strength of the election by jury approach. The structured process—with its protected time for learning, expert testimony, direct questioning, and diverse peer discussion—provides substantial benefits for decision quality that would remain valuable even in less-than-perfect demographic representation scenarios. The forced exposure to comprehensive information from multiple perspectives creates a shared factual basis for decision-making that is increasingly difficult to achieve in our fragmented media environment.

Even compared to compulsory universal voting, which would address demographic representation issues, election by jury would still offer the crucial advantage of structured deliberation that mass voting cannot provide. The deliberative process enables citizens to develop a deeper understanding of complex issues and make more informed judgments about which candidates would best serve the population's interests.

Election by jury creates a deliberative environment where jurors are exposed to evidence and arguments from all candidates, each acting in their own interest and free to critique opponents. Rather than attempting an impossible "unbiased" presentation, this approach embraces what might be called "omni-biased" presentation, which achieves effective neutrality through balanced opposition rather than false objectivity. This mirrors how our court system operates—no one expects prosecutors or defense attorneys to be objective; instead, justice emerges through structured adversarial advocacy. Similarly, election by jury recognizes that balance comes not from illusory impartiality, but from allowing all perspectives to be vigorously represented.

The most transformative aspect of the election by jury system may be something quite different from what many deliberative democracy advocates emphasize. While many sortition proposals focus heavily on citizen deliberation, the evidence suggests that simply watching structured presentations and cross-examinations may do most of the work in enabling informed decisions.

The Intelligence Squared debate series provides striking evidence of this phenomenon. In these Oxford-style debates, audience members vote on a proposition before and after hearing arguments from both sides, allowing for precise measurement of opinion shifts. Crucially, the audience members do not deliberate with each other—they merely observe the structured exchange between expert debaters.

The results are remarkable. In a 2009 Intelligence Squared debate on a controversial religious topic, the audience vote shifted dramatically. Before the debate, the vote was 678 for, 1,102 against, and 346 undecided. After hearing the arguments, it changed to 268 for and 1,876 against. This massive swing on a topic where most people would likely have pre-existing opinions demonstrates the power of structured presentation and expert argumentation.

Even more significantly, research across all Intelligence Squared debates shows that "on average, 32% of the Intelligence Squared audience has changed their mind from one side to the other after a debate". This level of opinion change occurs without any deliberation among audience members—they simply observe the structured presentation of competing arguments.

The effect varies by topic area. Analysis of the debates reveals that science and technology topics show the most dramatic opinion shifts, with "a median shift of 15.3 percentage points toward the winning side," compared to political topics, which had "the lowest median shift, at 7.6 percentage points". While this is the lowest shift among topics, a 7.6 percentage point swing is still politically significant—many elections are decided by much smaller margins. In a two-candidate race, this would represent a net difference of over 15 percentage points between candidates, more than enough to swing most elections. This demonstrates that even on contentious political issues where opinions tend to be more entrenched, structured presentation of competing arguments can still produce meaningful shifts in judgment.

It's important to recognize that Election by Jury addresses not just voter misinformation about issues, but also the profound lack of information about candidates themselves. In conventional elections, most voters know remarkably little about candidates beyond party affiliation, a few sound bites, and whatever impression they've formed from campaign advertising. Many cast votes based on minimal information about candidates' actual positions, experience, or character. Election by Jury directly counters this information deficit by giving jurors extended exposure to candidates—watching them think, respond to challenges, handle pressure, and articulate their positions. This direct observation provides far more meaningful information about candidate quality than the superficial impressions that dominate mass elections.

These findings suggest that the process of witnessing candidates engage in structured presentations, rebuttals, and cross-examinations would itself be the primary mechanism for juror education and opinion formation. While jury deliberation might provide some additional benefit, it could be considered "the cherry on top" rather than the core element. It is the "omni-biased" presentation—where candidates vigorously present their best case and critique opponents—that does the heavy lifting in helping jurors form well-reasoned judgments.

Election by jury also leverages a powerful cognitive phenomenon: humans can often recognize competence beyond their own level of expertise. Research on epistemic trust has demonstrated that laypeople use specific evaluative criteria to assess experts' competence even in domains where they lack specialized knowledge. According to the Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory (METI) study, non-experts successfully evaluate experts through observable markers of expertise, integrity, and benevolence even when they cannot directly assess the technical content of expert claims.

Similarly, research on medical decision-making and pilot training has shown that patients and student pilots can effectively identify skilled practitioners through observation of their communicative behaviors, confidence, and consistency in explaining complex topics. This ability to recognize competence without possessing it enables jurors to evaluate candidate quality through deliberative processes, much as a person without medical training can often distinguish between more and less competent doctors when observing them discuss medical issues.

This ability becomes even more reliable when aggregated across multiple diverse evaluators.

This combination—random selection for alignment, deliberation for information processing, and collective competence assessment—creates a system that optimizes for both alignment and competence without compromising either value. The jury doesn't need to match the expertise of candidates; it needs only to effectively evaluate which candidates would best serve the population's interests.

Some might suggest that rather than enhancing competence through deliberation and structured information processes, we could simply filter our decision-makers directly using educational requirements, competency tests, or other selection criteria. However, this alternative approach to achieving competence creates a fundamental trade-off that election by jury avoids.

Any attempt to filter for competence necessarily introduces bias that compromises the perfect alignment property of random selection. Once we apply any criterion beyond randomness, we create a group whose interests may systematically diverge from those of the general population. More concerning still, whoever controls these filtering mechanisms—whether authoritarians, partisan officials, or entrenched interests—can intentionally exploit them to create deliberate biases that serve their own agendas.

American history offers a sobering illustration of this principle. The literacy tests used in many states during the late 19th and early 20th centuries were ostensibly designed to ensure voter "competence," but in practice became tools that election administrators could apply selectively, leading to widespread disenfranchisement. This historical example demonstrates how competency requirements, once established, can be manipulated by those who control their implementation—regardless of the original intentions behind such requirements. The potential for such manipulation exists whenever we depart from random selection, which is why randomness remains the only mechanism that can achieve true alignment, as it inherently resists both unintentional structural biases and deliberate manipulation.

This brings our argument full circle: while random selection maximizes alignment, deliberation enhances competence, and the combination—as implemented in election by jury—creates a decision-making system that optimizes for both values without compromising either. By enhancing the competence of randomly selected citizens through deliberative processes and leveraging their ability to recognize expertise beyond their own, election by jury addresses both the alignment and competence requirements of effective democratic governance.

Historical Precedents and Contemporary Applications

In Athens's golden age (5th-4th centuries BCE), sortition was the primary method for selecting most government officials. The Council of 500 (Boule), which prepared legislation for the Assembly, was chosen annually by lot from the citizen population. Most judicial functions were performed by large juries of 201-501 citizens selected by lot on the day of trial. Even most administrative positions were filled through random selection rather than mass elections.

The Athenians recognized a truth that Aristotle explicitly stated in his Politics: "appointment by lot is considered democratic, while election is oligarchic." However, Aristotle wasn't criticizing the process of election itself, but rather addressing the common practice of mass public voting without deliberation. He was concerned about how unmediated popularity contests could favor the wealthy, famous, and well-connected.

We believe Aristotle wouldn't have waged this criticism against election by jury, where randomly selected citizens engage in thorough deliberation before making their electoral choice. This approach preserves the democratic principle of equal representation while enhancing the decision-making process through structured deliberation and information sharing.

What makes the Athenian example particularly relevant is that it was not a primitive experiment but a sophisticated system that sustained one of history's most remarkable civilizations through its period of greatest cultural, philosophical, and political achievement. The system included not only random selection but also accountability mechanisms, term limits, and deliberative procedures that enhanced the competence of ordinary citizens in their service.

For over 500 years (1268-1797), the Republic of Venice used a complex system combining random selection with deliberative choice to select its head of state, the Doge. This hybrid approach, which became fully established in 1268, was part of a governance model that sustained one of history's most stable republics for more than a millennium (697-1797 CE).

Venice's elaborate procedure for selecting the Doge involved multiple rounds alternating between random selection and deliberative choice. The process began with the random selection of 30 members from the Great Council, which was then narrowed to 9 through another lottery. These 9 would select 40 new members, who were reduced to 12 by lot. The 12 would select 25, reduced to 9 by lot, and so on through several more iterations.

This procedure combined the anti-corruption benefits of random selection with the quality-enhancing aspects of deliberative choice. It created a selection process resistant to faction and manipulation while still allowing for the assessment of candidate quality. The extraordinary stability of Venetian governance—with remarkably few coups or constitutional crises over hundreds of years—suggests the effectiveness of this hybrid approach.

The concept of using jury-like bodies for electoral decisions has historical roots going back to the early 20th century. H.G. Wells, in his 1903 work "Mankind in the Making," questioned the necessity of mass polling in democracy and proposed jury methods as an alternative:

"Is polling really essential to the democratic idea? There is a way by which the indisputable evils of democratic government may be very greatly diminished. Which will certainly raise the average quality of our legislators, and be infinitely saner, juster, and more deliberate than our present method. This way is the Jury system."

Wells recognized the fundamental flaws in mass electoral politics, noting that "government by hustings' bawling, newspaper clamour, and ward organization, is more perilous every day and more impotent." He argued that "it is in the direction of the substitution of the Jury method for a general poll that the only practicable line of improvement" exists for democratic governance.

His insights were remarkably prescient, anticipating the information environment problems that would come to plague electoral systems in the media age. Wells understood that democratic government had not truly been "tried and exhaustively proved inadequate" until jury methods had been properly attempted as an alternative to mass polling.

Contemporary Applications and the Growing Sortition Movement

In the past two decades, a global movement advocating for greater use of sortition in democratic governance has emerged. Organizations such as Democracy R&D, the Sortition Foundation, The newDemocracy Foundation, and the Center for Deliberative Democracy have promoted research, experimentation, and advocacy around deliberative mini-publics.

This movement has attracted support from across the political spectrum, with conservatives valuing its connection to tradition and its anti-corruption properties, progressives appreciating its inclusivity and representation of marginalized voices, and libertarians recognizing its potential to limit capture of government by special interests.

The movement has also developed a substantial academic literature examining the theoretical foundations, empirical results, and best practices of sortition-based approaches. Scholars such as Jane Mansbridge, Graham Smith, David Van Reybrouck, and many others have contributed to a growing body of knowledge about how random selection and deliberation can enhance democratic governance.

This combination of practical experimentation, theoretical development, and growing advocacy suggests that sortition-based approaches like election by jury are not merely historical curiosities but represent a serious contemporary response to the challenges facing democratic systems.

In recent decades, we have seen a resurgence of interest in sortition-based approaches, with various implementations around the world:

1. The Citizens' Assembly of British Columbia (2004) and Ontario (2006) brought together randomly selected citizens to deliberate on electoral reform, producing sophisticated recommendations that experts judged to be of high quality.

2. Ireland's Constitutional Convention (2012-2014) and subsequent Citizens' Assemblies used randomly selected citizens to deliberate on controversial constitutional questions, leading to successful referendums on same-sex marriage and abortion legalization that resolved longstanding social divisions.

3. The Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review provides deliberative citizen panels that evaluate ballot initiatives and provide information to voters, enhancing the quality of direct democracy.

4. The East Belgian Citizens' Council, established in 2019, is a permanent body of randomly selected citizens that can set the agenda for citizens' assemblies on specific topics, creating an institutionalized role for deliberative mini-publics.

5. Michigan's Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission completely redrew the state's district boundaries following the 2020 census. Composed of just 13 randomly selected citizens—four Democrats, four Republicans, and five independents—this commission made decisions that fundamentally reshaped the state's political landscape with profound consequences for power distribution.

6. The Mongolian Deliberative Poll on Constitutional Amendments (2017) demonstrated the effectiveness of deliberative approaches in a non-Western context, showing the cross-cultural applicability of these methods.

These experiments have demonstrated the practical feasibility of involving randomly selected citizens in complex decision-making processes. They showcase both the potential of citizen deliberation and the challenges of implementation that Election by Jury seeks to address. While promising, most represent isolated experiments rather than institutionalized governance mechanisms.

For a more comprehensive and established implementation of election by jury principles, we must look to Georgia's grand jury appointment system, where grand juries regularly select officials for various governmental bodies with significant authority. This isn't a pilot program or experiment, but rather an ongoing practice deeply embedded in Georgia's governance systems across numerous counties.

Under Georgia law (O.C.G.A. § 15-12-71), grand juries—composed of 16 to 23 randomly selected citizens—appoint members to various boards and commissions across the state, including:

• Ethics Boards: In several counties, grand juries appoint members to county ethics boards that oversee government ethics and handle complaints about officials. For example, the Henry County Board of Ethics is composed of seven members, with five of these members elected by the grand jury. This board was established in 2021 and began operations in 2022, representing a recent expansion of grand jury appointments into ethical oversight of county government. Clayton County's Ethics Board was created through legislation (HB 794) passed in March 2025, with five of its eight members to be elected by the grand jury, as outlined in the Clayton County Board of Ethics page.

• Boards of Elections: In counties like Lowndes County, the grand jury directly appoints all members of the county Board of Elections, ensuring citizen oversight of election administration. The Lowndes County Board consists of three members, all appointed by the Grand Jury and confirmed by the Superior Court Judge.

• Water and Sewer Authorities: Multiple county water authorities are governed by boards largely appointed by grand juries, including the Cherokee County Water & Sewerage Authority, where six of seven board members are selected by the grand jury.

These grand juries are themselves randomly selected from the county's eligible citizens, creating a two-tiered system of random selection that effectively removes the appointment process from direct political control. Officials selected through this process have demonstrated strong performance records and earned high public satisfaction, providing a working model of jury-based appointment in a contemporary American context.

For a more comprehensive overview of grand jury appointments in Georgia, including detailed examples and legal references, visit our "EBJ in Practice" page.

Election by Jury: Distinguished from Both Historical and Contemporary Applications

While Election by Jury draws inspiration from historical sortition practices, it represents a distinct approach that differs significantly from both ancient precedents and modern sortition experiments. These differences are critical to understanding Election by Jury's unique potential for addressing today's democratic challenges:

Distinctions from Historical Applications

Unlike Athenian democracy, which used sortition primarily for administrative positions with limited deliberation, Election by Jury focuses specifically on electoral decisions with intensive deliberative processes. The Athenian system placed citizens directly into governance roles, while Election by Jury employs citizens specifically to select representatives who will govern.

Similarly, Venice's selection system for the Doge combined random selection with deliberative choice but used multiple iterations of selection and reduction, creating a complex process that differs substantially from the direct jury deliberation proposed in Election by Jury. The Venetian system also focused exclusively on selecting a single head of state rather than addressing multiple electoral decisions across various levels of government.

Distinctions from Contemporary Applications

Election by Jury also differs from most contemporary sortition applications in several important ways:

Random and Compulsory vs. Stratified and Voluntary

Many modern sortition implementations rely on voluntary participation with stratified sampling, which compromises true representativeness. This approach faces two significant problems:

First, stratification only accounts for characteristics that designers choose to measure and can measure with precision. Sexual orientation, for example, exists on a spectrum rather than as simple categories. Political affiliation is similarly complex—a "Republican" might be moderately conservative or deeply right-wing, while an "Independent" might be more conservative than many Republicans or more progressive than many Democrats. These labels become largely arbitrary, yet stratification treats them as discrete, meaningful categories. The East Belgian Citizens' Council and Michigan Redistricting Commission both illustrate these limitations of stratified selection.

Second, some stratified selection approaches explicitly mandate equal representation for different groups regardless of their actual population distribution. For instance, the Michigan Redistricting Commission requires four Democrats, four Republicans, and five independents, which distorts representation if the actual population has different proportions of these groups.

Election by Jury advocates for pure random selection with mandatory participation, achieving mathematically perfect representation without these distortions.

The Compulsory vs. Voluntary Service Debate

While this article has generally advocated for compulsory service as optimal for representativeness, it's worth acknowledging an important counterargument emerging from some election by jury theorists. They suggest that voluntary participation might actually enhance decision quality by filtering out individuals with low conscientiousness or antisocial tendencies, despite introducing some degree of demographic bias.

This perspective recognizes an implicit trade-off: perfect demographic representation (through mandatory service) versus potentially higher average participant quality (through self-selection). The voluntary approach could be particularly relevant for implementing election by jury in non-governmental contexts like political organizations, professional associations, or other groups where compulsory service would be impractical or impossible to enforce.

If adopting a voluntary approach, the question of stratification becomes more complex. Stratification attempts to correct for participation biases, but as previously discussed, it introduces its own problems:

1. It only accounts for characteristics designers choose to measure and can measure precisely

2. It creates opportunities for manipulation by those who control the stratification criteria

3. It adds complexity and cost to the selection process

For organizations interested in implementing election by jury with voluntary participation, a thoughtful compromise might involve:

1. Vigorous recruitment efforts across diverse constituencies to maximize the initial pool of volunteers

2. Minimal or no stratification criteria to avoid introducing new biases

3. Random selection from within the volunteer pool to maintain the core benefit of randomness

4. Transparency about the demographic composition of both volunteers and selected jurors

This approach acknowledges that while pure statistical representation might be sacrificed, the benefits of the election by jury model—structured deliberation, comprehensive information, and citizen empowerment—can still be realized. It also recognizes that perfect should not be the enemy of good; partial implementation of election by jury principles may still yield substantial improvements over status quo decision-making processes.

The debate between voluntary and compulsory approaches highlights the flexibility of the election by jury concept. Rather than insisting on a single rigid implementation, advocates should consider how the core principles can be adapted to different contexts while preserving the essential features that make the approach valuable.

Ephemeral Service vs. Long-term Governance

A critical distinction concerns the duration of service required. Sortition approaches that place citizens directly into governing roles often create a dilemma:

1. Long-term service: Requiring randomly selected citizens to serve as legislators or policymakers for years is highly disruptive to their lives, potentially forcing them to leave jobs and careers.

2. Short-term service: Having frequent turnover in governing bodies undermines the development of policymaking expertise and the ability to shepherd complex legislation through multi-year processes.

This dilemma explains why many sortition experiments (like the Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review or Michigan's redistricting commission) are both ephemeral (addressing a single issue over a limited timeframe) and voluntary (abandoning true randomness for practicality).

Election by Jury resolves this tension by using random selection specifically for the selection process rather than ongoing governance. This approach:

• Keeps the time commitment manageable (typically 1-3 weeks), making compulsory service practical

• Allows citizens to return to their normal lives after voting

• Enables those who wish to serve in longer-term roles to do so, while ensuring their selection is democratically legitimate

• Preserves the development of governing expertise in elected officials while maintaining democratic accountability

Traditional sortition applications typically place randomly selected citizens directly into governance or advisory roles. Election by Jury uses randomly selected citizens specifically to select representatives, combining sortition's alignment benefits with the expertise of dedicated officials.

For episodic or limited tasks like redistricting or ballot initiative review, direct sortition may be appropriate as the service duration remains manageable. But for ongoing governance requiring specialized skills developed over time, Election by Jury provides a superior approach that balances perfect representation with practical governance needs.

Decision Focus

Traditional sortition bodies often tackle complex governance tasks directly. Election by Jury narrows the citizens' role to the specific task they are best positioned to perform: evaluating which candidates will best serve the population's interests. This leverages citizens' ability to recognize competence beyond their own level of expertise, as discussed in our section on competence.

Binding Authority vs. Advisory Role

Many contemporary sortition experiments are limited to providing recommendations rather than making binding decisions. This advisory status fundamentally undermines their impact, as established power structures can simply ignore their conclusions when politically convenient. The Citizens' Assemblies in British Columbia, Ontario, and Ireland all faced this limitation, with governments sometimes rejecting or ignoring their carefully developed recommendations.

Election by Jury, in contrast, places decisive electoral authority directly in the hands of randomly selected citizens, ensuring their decisions have real and immediate consequences for governance. This legally binding nature is not merely a detail but a core principle that distinguishes Election by Jury from other democratic mechanisms and ensures its effectiveness in practice.

These distinctions highlight why Election by Jury represents a unique democratic mechanism rather than merely a revival of historical practices or an extension of contemporary sortition experiments. By addressing the limitations of both historical and modern approaches while incorporating advanced understanding of social choice theory and information environments, Election by Jury offers a more complete and practical democratic safeguard specifically designed for the challenges of the AI era.

Practical Implementation

The specific implementation of election by jury builds on these refinements to create a system optimized for both alignment and competence. The core design includes:

1. Random selection of a representative jury from the citizen population, with size determined by the electorate size and scope of decision

2. Protected time and compensation for jurors to participate fully without financial hardship, typically 1-3 weeks for the process

3. A structured learning phase where jurors receive comprehensive information about candidates and issues from multiple perspectives

4. Direct questioning of candidates by jurors in a format that allows for follow-up and deeper exploration than typical debate formats

5. Facilitated deliberation among jurors to process information, share perspectives, and work toward decisions

6. A final selection process where jurors vote on candidates after completing the deliberative process

7. Oversight by a "referee" whose role is strictly to ensure procedural fairness and adherence to the established rules, not to make any judgments about the merits of candidates or arguments—the jury alone holds the decision-making authority

This approach specifically addresses the challenges posed by AI and information warfare in ways that mass elections by the general public cannot. Unlike voters in mass elections who often lack time for deep study of candidates and issues and have limited opportunity for deliberation with diverse peers, election by jury provides a structured environment for high-quality democratic decision-making.

When designing an election by jury system, one of the most common questions is: "How many jurors do we need?" This question touches on both practical concerns (cost, logistics) and fundamental principles (statistical accuracy, resistance to manipulation).

From a purely statistical perspective, we need far fewer people than you might think to represent a population accurately. Here's a simple way to understand this:

Imagine a town of 100 people deciding between two candidates. If we randomly select 23 people for our jury, and 16 of them (about 70%) support Candidate A, we can be 94.5% confident that Candidate A would win if everyone in town voted.

What's remarkable is that this confidence barely changes as the population grows:

• With 1,000 people, our confidence is still 92%

• With 10,000 people, it's 91.8%

• Even with millions of people, it never drops below 91.79%

This principle is similar to how polls are supposed to work in theory - a perfectly random sample of 1,000 people can accurately represent the opinions of an entire country of millions. However, Election by Jury provides two critical advantages over conventional polling or voluntary voting systems:

1. True random selection: Unlike polls that struggle with selection bias (who answers the phone, who has time to respond), or voluntary voting (which systematically underrepresents certain demographics), Election by Jury implements mandatory participation with true random selection, ensuring a genuinely representative sample.

2. Compulsory participation: Because jury service is mandatory, it eliminates the self-selection bias that plagues both polling and conventional elections. The participation disparities we documented earlier (such as younger and minority voters being systematically underrepresented) simply don't exist in a properly implemented jury system.

The key insight: The size of the population matters far less than the size of our sample, how truly random it is, and how decisive the jury's preference is.

While these calculations work well for choices between two candidates, real elections often involve multiple candidates, making things more complex. When selecting from several options, we need to consider:

• Voting methods matter: Different ways of counting votes (plurality voting, approval voting, score voting) can dramatically affect outcomes. In some systems, a candidate who would lose in a head-to-head matchup might win in a multi-candidate race due to vote splitting. Think of how a third-party candidate might change the dynamics of an election between two major candidates.

• Not all "wrong" outcomes are equally bad: If voters slightly prefer Candidate A over similar Candidate B, mistakenly selecting B isn't as harmful as selecting dissimilar Candidate C, whom voters strongly dislike.

The ice cream analogy helps explain this: if your favorite flavor is chocolate brownie and your second favorite is plain chocolate, getting plain chocolate instead of chocolate brownie is a minor disappointment. But if you strongly dislike strawberry, getting strawberry instead would be much worse.

Let's imagine a city council election with three candidates: Alice, Eve, and Bob. If most voters slightly prefer Alice over similar candidate Eve but strongly prefer both over Bob, then accidentally electing Eve would be a minor issue, while accidentally electing dissimilar candidate Bob would be a much bigger problem. Good evaluation metrics should account for these preference strengths rather than treating any divergence from the optimal outcome as equally problematic.

How do we know if an election system is doing a good job? Election scientists have developed a way to measure this called "voter satisfaction efficiency" (VSE). This evaluates how closely election outcomes match with the overall preferences of voters, considering not just whether the "right" candidate won, but how severe the consequences are when they don't.

Research suggests that using advanced voting methods like score voting (where jurors rate candidates on a scale, say from 0-5) may significantly improve results even with small juries:

• Just 24 voters using score voting could potentially capture over 90% of the optimal obtainable voter satisfaction

• Even smaller juries might achieve high efficiency with the right voting method

These results have an important explanation: when candidates are similar (and our statistical confidence in identifying the "best" one is lowest), the real-world impact of selecting the "wrong" one is typically smaller. Conversely, when candidates differ dramatically in voter appeal, our statistical confidence in the jury's decision tends to be much higher. VSE captures this reality by measuring not just how often the process selects the "right" candidate, but also how much satisfaction is lost when it doesn't.

This explains why even small juries might make good decisions when using the right voting methods. It's also worth noting that suboptimal election outcomes already happen frequently in our current system due to vote splitting, demographic disparities in turnout, and misinformed voting where voters later experience buyer's remorse about their choices.

While statistics suggest even small juries can accurately represent a population's preferences, we must also protect against potential corruption through bribery or coercion. This is where larger juries become valuable:

The more jurors involved, the more expensive and risky bribery and coercion become. Think about it this way: if each attempted bribe or threat has just a 5% chance of being reported to authorities, attempting to compromise just 14 jurors creates a greater than 50% chance of being caught. With 20 jurors, that risk increases to 64%, and with 30 jurors, it jumps to 79%.

This isn't just theoretical. Grand juries in Georgia have demonstrated real effectiveness in combating corruption. In a notable case from Cherokee County, Georgia that was documented in a Fox 5 news segment, a grand jury investigated and removed a Board of Equalization member for showing favoritism toward taxpayers and failing to comply with state law. The investigation found this member was involved in 83% of the total property value reductions in 2017 despite participating in only 18% of appeals. This concrete example shows that jury-based systems not only resist tampering but actively root out corruption when it occurs, providing a powerful accountability mechanism often missing in conventional electoral systems.

Several procedural safeguards further protect the integrity of the jury process. Most fundamentally, election by jury would employ secret ballots, ensuring that no one—not even other jurors—would know how any individual voted. This confidentiality is critical, as it eliminates the possibility of verifying whether bribery or intimidation achieved its intended result, substantially reducing the incentive to attempt such tampering in the first place. Additionally, confidentiality extends beyond voting to the deliberation process itself. This protection is routinely employed in grand jury proceedings in Georgia, where jurors take an oath to "keep the deliberations of the Grand Jury secret".

The existing legal framework also provides robust protections against jury tampering. Under Georgia law, attempting to influence witnesses or jurors through intimidation, threats, or corruption carries significant criminal penalties. In high-profile cases, additional security measures can be implemented, including restricting juror information and providing protective services if necessary. A recent example came to light in 2023, when the FBI and Fulton County Sheriff's Office investigated threats against grand jurors after a highly publicized indictment, demonstrating how seriously such threats are taken by law enforcement.

Concerns about jury tampering are not unique to election by jury—they apply equally to criminal trials, where juries already make life-or-death decisions. The John Gotti case, where a jury foreman was convicted of accepting $75,000 for a favorable vote, illustrates that while such attempts do occur, they are detected and prosecuted. The judicial system has developed numerous safeguards over centuries to address these risks, and these same protections would apply to election juries.

To balance these statistical and security considerations, we need a straightforward method to determine appropriate jury size. One approach worth considering is using the cube root of the electorate population. This would mean:

• A small town of 8,000 voters: approximately 20 jurors

• A mid-sized city of 125,000: about 50 jurors

• A congressional district of 750,000: roughly 90 jurors

• A state with 8 million voters: about 200 jurors

• A national election with 240 million eligible voters: approximately 620 jurors

While this formula is not the only possible approach, it offers several practical advantages:

1. It provides jury sizes larger than needed for basic statistical representation, creating a buffer against tampering

2. It recognizes the diminishing returns of adding more jurors as population increases

3. It yields practical jury sizes that can still deliberate effectively while providing meaningful resistance to corruption

This approach suggests jury sizes that balance representational accuracy, tampering resistance, and practical feasibility.

The design of an election by jury process must carefully balance several key objectives to ensure fairness, thoroughness, and resistance to manipulation. While various implementations are possible, any effective system should adhere to these core principles:

• Equal candidate opportunity: All candidates must receive equivalent time and opportunity to present their case.

• Candidate control: Candidates should have significant control over how they use their allotted time.

• Diverse information modes: The process should allow for various types of information exchange (presentations, cross-examination, expert testimony).

• Juror independence: The system must protect jurors from undue influence by candidates, facilitators, or other jurors.

• Bias minimization: Procedural safeguards should prevent individual jurors from unduly influencing outcomes through question selection or framing.

• Deliberative space: Jurors need protected time and structure for thoughtful deliberation.

• Fair vote aggregation: The voting mechanism should capture nuanced preferences, not just binary choices.

Several specific implementations could satisfy these principles. One promising approach uses a self-governed time management system where:

• Candidates present in rounds, similar to chess players managing their time clocks, deciding when to use their time and how much to use in each turn

• Candidates can cross-examine opponents directly, with time deducted from their own allocation

• Juror questions are anonymized and posed to the entire candidate pool rather than targeting specific individuals

• Candidates decide whether to address specific juror concerns based on their own strategic assessment

• Voting uses a score voting system (e.g. 0-5, 0-99) rather than simple plurality voting

This approach, by giving candidates control over their time and participation, minimizes the risk of bias from moderators or question selection while ensuring all candidates have equal opportunity to make their case. The anonymized question format prevents individual jurors from using questions to favor certain candidates, and the scoring system allows jurors to express degrees of preference.

Other implementations might emphasize different elements, such as more structured debate formats or greater moderator control, but any effective system must carefully balance the core principles to ensure a fair, thorough, and bias-resistant process.

Addressing Potential Concerns

Several common concerns about election by jury have already been addressed throughout this piece.

First, the concern that random citizens lack expertise simply restates the competence challenge we examined extensively in the section on deliberation. As established, any filtering for "competence" necessarily compromises perfect alignment, and our approach enhances decision quality through deliberation, comprehensive information access, and the well-documented ability of people to recognize competence in others.

Second, concerns about demographic biases from jury service avoidance were addressed in our discussion of random selection, where we demonstrated that such distortions would be dramatically smaller than the massive disparities in current voter turnout. We further established in our section on deliberation that the enhanced competence from structured deliberation would make election by jury valuable even with imperfect demographic representation.

Third, concerns about tampering are addressed by our jury size calculations, secret ballot voting, and procedural safeguards. We already entrust citizen juries with life-or-death decisions in our legal system, and examples like Michigan's redistricting commission demonstrate that even small juries can make high-quality, consequential political decisions when properly structured.

"Compulsory Service Is Impractical"

This concern is directly refuted by Georgia's established system, where all 159 counties routinely impanel grand juries that serve for substantial terms. In Clayton County, grand jurors serve for a period of three months, meeting one day per week. Chatham County selects 16-23 grand jurors (as required by Georgia state law) who typically serve for three months, usually reporting every Wednesday. Other counties like Cobb and DeKalb utilize two-month terms with jurors meeting once or twice per week. These citizens successfully appoint officials to various boards and commissions, demonstrating that jury service is entirely practical when properly structured and compensated.

Election by jury would require even shorter commitments—typically 1-3 weeks. This approach strikes a crucial balance: long enough for meaningful deliberation but short enough to be compatible with citizens' existing lives and responsibilities. Unlike arrangements that place citizens directly into long-term governance roles, election by jury asks citizens to participate in the electoral process only, returning to their regular lives afterward while allowing elected officials to develop governance expertise over longer terms.

"What About Managing the Number of Candidates?"

By reducing the financial barriers to candidacy, election by jury could potentially increase the number of candidates willing to run for office. Since the process gives jurors dedicated time to focus on issues and hear from candidates, it could reasonably accommodate more candidates than conventional elections—potentially upward of 20 candidates in a single race.

This benefit raises a legitimate question about filtering out frivolous candidacies. Some threshold requirements would still be necessary to ensure serious intent and minimal baseline support. Two primary mechanisms could serve this purpose:

1. Signature requirements: Collecting signatures from registered voters demonstrates some baseline community support. While this approach has democratic appeal as an organic test of support, it can disadvantage candidates without organizational infrastructure. Collecting signatures effectively becomes a fundraising issue, as staff can assist in gathering them. Furthermore, even polarizing candidates can typically find a small percentage of voters who form their base, making signatures an imperfect filter.

2. Filing fees: These provide a direct financial threshold that tests candidate seriousness. Unlike signature gathering, which consumes resources without producing value, filing fees transfer resources to the government where they can be used productively. This approach has the advantage of efficiency but may disadvantage candidates with limited personal financial resources.

A balanced approach would likely combine moderate versions of both mechanisms, potentially with provisions for fee waivers based on signature gathering to ensure financial resources alone don't determine who can run. The goal would be to establish a reasonable threshold that prevents system overload from frivolous candidacies while maintaining the core benefit of election by jury: giving serious candidates equal opportunity regardless of financial resources.

Conclusion: Democracy's Safeguard in the Age of AI

As we navigate the challenges of AI-driven information warfare, democratic governance faces unprecedented threats to its integrity and effectiveness. Election by jury represents a promising response to these challenges, offering a system that optimizes for both alignment with citizen interests and competence in decision-making.

By combining the statistical representativeness of random selection with the cognitive benefits of deliberation, election by jury creates a decision-making process that is simultaneously more representative and more resilient than traditional electoral systems. It addresses the specific vulnerabilities that advanced AI systems, social media echo chambers, and coordinated information operations exploit in mass elections while building on proven historical precedents and contemporary implementations.

The approach is not a radical departure from democratic principles but rather their logical evolution in response to new technological realities. Georgia's ongoing and expanding use of grand jury appointments for critical governance roles demonstrates the practical viability of this approach in a contemporary American context. The remarkable success of recent implementations like the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission further validates the capacity of randomly selected citizens to handle consequential decisions with integrity and effectiveness.

As AI capabilities continue to advance, the need for democratic improvements that can withstand new forms of influence becomes increasingly urgent. Election by jury offers a promising path forward—one that embraces technology's benefits while protecting against its risks, honors democratic traditions while adapting them to new realities, and maintains human agency in governance while enhancing its effectiveness.

The time has come to seriously consider election by jury not as a theoretical curiosity but as a practical necessity for preserving meaningful democratic governance in the age of artificial intelligence.

Fact-checking for this article is available here.