Critics behind this challenge argue that elections give the vote too broadly, including to citizens who may lack the knowledge or judgment needed to make informed political choices. Writers such as Caplan (2007), Achen and Bartels (2016), and Brennan (2016) argue that voters are often too poorly informed or irrational to be trusted with this kind of power. They do not reject elections altogether, but they do question universal suffrage and suggest that some citizens should be excluded from voting. Different scholars propose different kinds of knowledge-based requirements for participation (J. Brennan 2009; López-Guerra 2014; Giavazzi 2024). This is the epistemic challenge.

Some scholars argue that low and declining turnout in liberal democracies means that too many citizens are effectively left out of elections. Hill (2014), Chapman (2022), and Elliott (2023) therefore defend compulsory voting. In their view, requiring everyone to vote would make politicians answerable to the whole electorate, not just to the older, wealthier, and better educated citizens who are most likely to turn out (Blais, Dassonneville, and Kostelka 2020). They do not reject elections or universal suffrage. Rather, they argue that elections work more democratically when everyone is required to participate. This is the participatory challenge.

A more radical critique sees elections as inherently aristocratic and argues that they should be replaced by selection by lot. Scholars such as Landemore (2020) and Guerrero (2024), along with public intellectuals such as van Reybrouck (2016), contend that elections fail to secure political equality and should give way to random selection. Others defend hybrid models that combine elections with lotteries, arguing that lotteries introduce a more egalitarian element into the process of selecting representatives (Zakaras 2010; Owen and Smith 2018; Gastil and Wright 2019; Abizadeh 2021; Stone and Malkopoulou 2022). This is the sortition challenge.