At least one political philosopher has put forward the radical idea that we could ensure informed voters by employing an “enfranchisement lottery.” Such a lottery would restrict voting to a randomly chosen group of citizens who are provided unbiased in-depth information relevant to an election. We can think of this approach as a matter of modeling our voting on our jury system. We would never accept deciding important and highly publicized trials by a vote of the general public. We think only people fully informed of the facts and relevant arguments put forward in a trial should make such important judgments. Shouldn’t we be at least as careful in deciding who should be president?

Notice that answering yes does not imply the elitist view that only a small minority of citizens are capable of making informed votes. The idea is not that voters are too stupid or biased to access the needed information; it’s just that they don’t have the time and resources to do so. Ideally, we would provide everyone with the relevant knowledge, but that would be impractical, time-consuming and expensive.

Why not, then, randomly choose, from the list of registered voters, a national jury that would meet for a week or two before the election? The jurors would be sequestered and listen to presentations from and debates among the candidates and their policy teams. The jury might also hear from and question experts on major policy issues. The result would be voters informed to a level most us can only hope to achieve. We would need a fairly large jury — perhaps several thousand — to properly represent the nation’s diverse views and interests. Televising the proceedings would help ensure transparency. Since the jury was randomly chosen, its vote would very likely represent the outcome of an election in which we were all well-informed voters

Apart from the many difficult details that would have to be worked out, isn’t a jury system of voting unconstitutional because it denies most citizens the right to vote? Surprisingly, there’s some dispute about a constitutional right to vote. Scholars have pointed out that there’s no passage in the Constitution that says explicitly that there is a right to vote, but most argue that such a right is implicit in, for example, amendments that prohibit denying the vote because of race and gender. So it seems clear that a jury system would require amending the Constitution.

More important, such an amendment would reverse what has perhaps been the main thrust of our democracy’s historical development. Initially, only white male property owners could vote. There was a long and often bloody struggle to include all citizens, regardless of economic status, race and gender — and the fight still continues to oppose de facto exclusions of those legally allowed to vote. As a result, the electoral jury system would face huge opposition from a public that quite properly regards the right to vote as the hallmark of a free citizen.

We could, however, get many of the jury system’s benefits without eliminating our current form of elections. We could have an unofficial jury — chosen, perhaps, by a consortium of major universities or of television news divisions — that would meet, discuss in depth and vote several weeks before the actual election. Coverage of its proceedings could substantially raise the quality of debate in the final weeks of the campaign. Candidates might hesitate to participate at first, but if so the project could begin with informed and articulate nonofficial supporters making their cases. Once the jury established itself as a significant factor in the national electoral debates, candidates would likely insist on taking part themselves. Even though the jurors would not decide the election, their vote would very likely come to exercise considerable influence on the result. Such a jury might well be the best practical way toward more informed and intelligent voting.