<Seems to me, we're better off raising the level of the "least" - and not just where voting is concerned.

If you are saying what I think you are, that we should somehow create a wiser and more educated populace, this is a nice sentiment, and a good goal, but not realistic for everyone.

We now live in a nation where education from kindergarten through high school is not only free, but compulsory. Yet a lot of people are uneducated. At some point one has to realize that a lot of horses are coming to the water and refusing to drink. One has to make sure that they don't drag down the rest of us.

No matter how hard you try, there are always going to be smart people and idiots, and it would be nice if there was some way to make sure the smarter ones (and I'm not just talking IQ here) have more of a say in things.

I have absolutely no bright ideas at all about how to do this reliably. "Smarts" and "common sense" are a lot harder to nail down than raw numerical intelligence, and are probably more important. I can think of gardeners and janitors who never went to school who I would much rather see in a polling booth than a lot of college professors.

I would not subject the selection of someone to do my brain surgery to the vote of fifty people pulled off the street at random. Why should politicians, who can do one hell of a lot more good and damage than a brain surgeon, be an exception?

Universal democracy under a republic system of representatives works--barely--in a nation where the government is severely limited in what it can do to citizens and their livelihoods (what our Constitution was supposed to do). Our current system is no longer practically limited this way, and one sector of the populace can literally vote to dismantle another sector and disperse their wealth to themselves. Just to name one abuse of pure democracy.

As a libertarian, of course, my solution would be to reduce the power of the government to an absolute minimum, which minimizes the damage a badly-run one can do. But of course, no one's interested in moving in that direction.