Re: Prerequisites for universal suffrage
We tried that. They were called literacy tests and they were part and parcel with Jim Crow as a way to keep black people poor and disenfranchised and thus unrepresented.
The problem with the OPs suggestion is that people tend to vote their own interests no matter how uneducated they are. I think a good example of this is laws restricting teenage driving. If politicians get wind that a certain category of people can't hurt them at the ballot box, the mind they pay their interests pretty much goes to zero.
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