The months-long frenzy surrounding the 2024 U.S. presidential election both masked and underscored the presence of a very worrisome elephant in the room. I’m not referring to the Republican Party, but to an extremely dangerous elephant that’s grown by leaps and bounds in recent years and now threatens to burst the room asunder.

That elephant is the breakdown of the electoral process – a mechanism that we venerate reflexively, but that’s no longer functioning as originally intended. Its breakdown has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with how much the country has changed since the Constitution was written. While the American ship of state has evolved from a wind-powered sloop into a high-tech ocean liner, we’re still trying to steer it with the equivalent of a simple wooden rudder – and the result is that, instead of democracy, we now have something more akin to “manipulocracy.”

That’s clearly not what America’s founders had in mind. For one thing, they were far from unanimous about letting the people elect the country’s leaders (e.g., Roger Sherman, Connecticut’s delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, protested that the citizens “lack information and are constantly liable to be misled”). So imagine how the founders would have felt if they’d foreseen a situation in which one of the public’s main sources of information was so lacking in gatekeepers that lies, distortions, and even unhinged ravings could share equal billing with well-founded fare. 

Yet that’s what we have today, thanks to the unintended consequences of technology that was unimaginable in the 18^th century. As we’re reminded repeatedly, the internet – despite its considerable benefits – is an anything-goes Wild West that, by making it hard to distinguish truth from falsehood, ends up amplifying fallacies, encouraging manipulation, and sowing division. Add to this the insidious effects of television – a medium that not only emphasizes appearance over substance, but also promotes celebrity-worship (thus giving an enormous advantage to candidates who are already stars), facilitates the projection of misleading personas, and is readily weaponized by partisan news networks. What’s more, the combined forces of television, radio, and social media oversimplify complex issues by reducing political messages to short soundbites, and amp up the manipulation process to unprecedented levels by supercharging such corrosive tactics as deceptive advertising.

As if all this weren’t enough, the founders warned that the electoral process would only be effective if voters were well-informed, yet surveys show us falling well short of informed when it comes to local, national, and world affairs. Granted, those affairs are far more complex today than when the country was founded, and require much time and effort just to keep up with – as does taking one’s voting obligations seriously, which can entail doing research on dozens of candidates at the national, state, and local levels. This overwhelms many voters, lowering turnout at the polls and increasing the number of votes that are based on ignorance and misconception.

So, with our cherished electoral system no longer working properly, how can we choose our leaders without merely adding to what is, essentially, a hallowed mess? Banning all forms of political advertising would certainly help, as would increasing the number of televised debates between candidates; but it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Stricter control of television and the internet isn’t the answer, either – not just because of the staggering logistics, but also because that kind of control could too easily be misused.

One way, though, to increase the likelihood of our leaders being both representative of the people and effective could be by selecting them at random from among qualified and willing citizens. Although that might seem like a crazy idea, it’s starting to draw attention from various quarters, and is precisely how some officials were chosen in ancient Greece, democracy’s birthplace – which shouldn’t be surprising, given that randomly picking a nation’s leaders from among its citizens embodies democracy’s literal meaning: “rule by the people.”

Random selection would solve two critical problems by bypassing an electoral process that’s become unviable, and also preventing the power-hungry and the self-seeking from pursuing office. And thanks to the law of averages, it would ensure that, over the long run, our leaders were truly representative of the country, ideologically as well as demographically. What’s more, it would remove money and the cult of personality from the equation, do away with the controversial Electoral College, and help ease the polarization that’s tearing us apart as a nation – not to mention rescuing a foundering democracy that surveys show we’ve lost faith in.

We have the technology to carry out random selection and monitor it sufficiently to prevent tampering. A qualifying test could screen out those who didn’t meet whatever minimum standards we set for cognitive ability, general knowledge, etc. Selectees could receive preparatory training to familiarize them with their new roles and to provide background on key issues they’d encounter, with term lengths expanded appropriately.

All of this is just idle musing, of course – not only because the Constitution wisely makes it difficult to change anything related to our government, but also because the tradition of voting has acquired an aura of sanctity befitting a religious rite. But unless we come up with some way to restore our broken electoral system to working order, our government’s effectiveness will continue to diminish – until all that remains of the room is the elephant that destroyed it.

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