Democracy at its best does not need any systems or hierarchies or even parties. It needs people, all equal, to all vote, and to all be counted. That's it.
I for one am all for mandatory voting, and a mandatory voting national holiday. Those who don't want to vote can vote "null" in protest. And they will feel their voice was heard because it will be. That would be a true democracy and a holiday America would be proud of.
There is nothing that can be placed in between you and your voice that will add to what you will say. No system, no bureaucracy, no process, no delegate, nothing. This is a fundamental virtue of communication. Imagine if anything stood between you and the submit button you used to respond? Even if you had to tell someone first who then had to tell me, the message could be tainted. A man-in-the-middle is inherently insecure, whether it's actually a man or anything else. Just my keyboard will give me typos.
It's unfeasible to educate all 150M+ voters to the level where we can be confident their opinion on the question is informed. Absent that, their votes will only measure how the question feels with respect to gut-instinct and common "wisdom". Moreover, it would be a waste of time to have 300M (we need to teach the children too) people all be educated on the minutiae of every public policy. The field of public policy is an actual discipline precisely because it is something that people need to specialize in.
Given questions like,
- what range of broadcasting frequencies should be set aside for public use?
- what should the maximum allowable individual gross income be before one should be required to pay AMT if it exceeds AGI; what about jointly-filing couples?
- what should the agricultural subsidy be for soy and grain farmers?
how do you think the average person is supposed to decide these things?
You're saying not all votes are equal, and that idiots shouldn't get to vote. This violates a basic tenet of democracy. The next step would be to not allow them to speak, because they will contaminate the minds of our good voters. Or better yet, kill them. That's censorship, and genocide, and precisely how they occur even today.
The moment we decide we need to determine who is good enough, we start comparing people. This opens the floodgates of racism, sexism, ageism, elitism, and every -ism under the stars. Democrats will discriminate republicans, and Bloods will discriminate Crips. You of course are free to argue you are none of these things, but now you're saying you're above these people, and so you've just joined the discrimination.
Who is to judge anyone but ourselves?
If democracy is about equal voice, then all these comparisons between people become moot. This is how democracy transcends what any of us think of each other, and that's the beauty of it. And that's why it's better than anything else we've come up with so far.
Granted all of our votes are equal, you are free to attempt to educate the 150M+ voter pool if you so desire. This is what you are free to do, and encouraged to do. Go out and solve the problems you envision, so long as you don't alter our democracy as part of your solution.
That is why the only issue in implementing a true democracy is with the logistics of accounting for our voices. And anything that gets in the way, be it requiring IDs, or delegates, or electoral votes, or districts... all become hindrances to democracy. But the moment anyone tries to manipulate votes, these are the devices they have. This is how they get in between us and our vote. And that is why there is so much of it. It works! People, like you mind you, who have ideas about "how" votes should be counted decide to muck with democracy, and to their credit, they have been successful.
Setting all this aside, what you are advocating is to have a more educated voter pool, which doesn't seem like a bad idea. Backing votes with more brainpower clearly will dictate decisions to be smarter. You will be able to back this statement with evidence, because it is true.
The problem is not with the statement or the desire to design a better democracy. The problem is with everything else. And with all things considered, "equal voice + freedom of speech - violence" still seems like the best equation.
Speak not to change the system but to change people's minds. This already works in America. I can't even name where it works anywhere else. The system is still broken, but only because we don't need 99% of it (and by system I mean voting, not government).
How about if you respond to what the GP actually said instead of making up things that they didn't say? It seems to me that what they actually said is that "representative democracy works better for the real people in the real world -- a large percentage of whose time, on average, is and, for maximum personal and social benefit must be, spent on non-public-policy pursuits -- than direct democracy in which every public policy question was directly submitted to the citizenry.
There may be good counterarguments against what was actually said, but the strawman you set up, and the arguments you deploy against that strawman, are not among them.