The reality is that most people that vote do not know all that much about anything materially helpful from a geopolitical standpoint (many politicians themselves included I&#x27;ll assert) and are basically low-information, single-issue voters that get pandered to in elections, unfortunately. While some arbitrary criteria is needed to keep people voting on issues that they have no information about (although I argue many 15 year olds are better informed than many 51 year olds, the <i>average</i> 15 year old is definitely not while we have some debate on the 51 year olds), establishing some &quot;knowledge test&quot; or something similar for voting is how we lose the basic foundations of democracy.<p>What really needs to be done particularly in the US is increased voter <i>motivation</i> because low turn-outs are not helping anything at all here. People don&#x27;t want to talk politics out of &quot;politeness&quot; or something other passive policy and the country continues to have trouble talking about hard issues without leading to emotionally charged methods of &quot;argument&quot; that have led us to the current state of things with low voter engagement and politics devolving into a minstrel show of democracy.