Quote from 377OHMS:
That isn't how it was setup originally. You had to own a substantial amount of land to vote. We should go back to that model.
Pure democracy, with no criteria to establish suffrage except age and citizenship, is, of course, nonsense, though it is common. Unfortunately, the logical criteria: education, the U.S. cannot ethically require, because for nearly two centuries it denied a fraction of its population access to adequate education, and then when its moral conscience would no longer accept this, with rare exception, or in locales where the population was homogeneous and white, it left public education as "strange fruit" twisting slowly in the wind. And now there are voices that, if they have their way, will deal public education the final death blow.
The illogical argument that if one is old enough to die for one's country one is old enough to vote, succeeded in 1971 with ratification of the 26th Amendment. Whereas logically it should have been concluded that one is not old enough to die for one's country at age eighteen, because one has not yet typically obtained enough life experience nor depth of thinking to be able to make an informed decision whether or not it is a good idea to risk one's life in the cause of the moment.
Had reason triumphed over passion fueled by the ill-advised American Vietnam adventure, the action taken would have been the opposite: to raise the recruiting age, and perhaps raise the voting age as well!
Sadly, the 1971 triumph of democracy, however illogical, hasn't produced more democratic U.S. presidential elections, as minority presidents are still elected by the very undemocratic Electoral College, or in one case, a very unconstitutional Court intervention! (Too bad those eighteen to twenty somethings who worked so hard in 1970-71 to get the voting age reduced didn't spend their efforts instead on getting the Electoral College abolished! Had they done so, they'd have done far more for democracy.)
One seemingly innocuous, but in retrospect especially bad, decision can lead to many more bad decisions. The ultimate result could become irreversible before it is recognized as such.