@OrechDin. I am also an idealist, we are just framing is differently. Your ideal seems to be that everyone has a vote. My ideal is that only knowledgeable people with good character make important decisions. I appreciate that both ideas are important.
Practically speaking, a politician can either morph/present his ideas to appeal to more people, or to motivate more people who like his ideas to vote. I think currently the first path is easy to abuse – politicians can compute which marginal voters they can appeal to with bribes (I’ll pay for your college or social security, Southern Strategy) or with falsehoods. I think it is healthy when politicians have to motivate masses of voters. We should not use government money to help them mailing ballot applications. Parties can work on that on their own. We are also giving party operatives two months to go knock on the doors and “help” people fill out ballots.
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PS Theoretically speaking, we can establish a system that achieves both – you vote and pass an unbiased test, mixture of IQ, math, and civics. Only computer knows whether you passed the test and your vote counted. Maybe, you can have a quote – each state gets one smart senator from top 10% of the vote and one stupid from the rest. Senators were supposed to be that layer elected by elite – elected by the educated legislature. We can surely use technology now to achieve the same goal.