[snowwrestler]

Voting is not a structured intellectual exercise like taking a test or writing a paper. There's not a single "right" answer that you have to be smart to figure out.

Voting is an exercise in representation. People vote based on what they want, not what they know. Desires, dreams, and concerns are not knowledge. Smart people, educated people, still have emotions, can still have hugely different values, and want wildly different things.

The purpose of democracy is to adjudicate between competing desires without violence. If you try to exclude a category of people from this process, you harm its legitimacy and it stops working well for everyone. The end point of that trajectory is revolution.

[umvi]

In an ideal democracy, that's how it works. But we see in a corrupt democracy, the elite politicians manipulate people that think with emotions, and buy their votes with false promises and handouts. And they can never be blamed because "4 years is not enough to accomplish much"

[snowwrestler]

Somehow it's always other people who are too emotional or ignorant to vote properly.

I can't remember seeing someone raise their hand and say, "I'm too emotional and poorly informed, please take away my right to vote." Wonder why that is.

[tchaffee]

They aren't always false promises and handouts. Lobbyists get paid big bucks to bribe, oops, I mean to inform politicians on policy. Those promises often get delivered. Unfortunately.