Let's not forget the two slippery fish in our hands that is other people's "ignorance" and our "knowledge."
As may seem likely from the thrust of my prior comment, I don't favor the universal franchise as a system of rule; it seems to me prone on the one hand to severe corruption as various actors seek to regather the sovereign power which this scheme so atomizes, and on the other hand to precisely the sort of popular enthusiasm which the American founders sought to render harmless, a purpose whose merit the events of the twentieth century do much to demonstrate.
Most who espouse such an opinion of universal suffrage seem to imagine it being replaced by a scheme in which they themselves still have some, indeed a much larger, measure of the power to rule. I think this is a mistake; where it isn't a deliberate satisfaction of arrogance, it seems to me prone to encourage that arrogance develop. I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession.
Of course, the problem of competent rule remains, and it's not a simple one - I don't think I could even produce a formal definition, although Singapore seems like a good example in a lot of ways, and perhaps Sweden, or the Nordic countries in general, in some others. In any case, recent history offers little that I can see to suggest that universal suffrage offers a uniquely, or even notably, reliable solution to this problem, either.
Arguably that's what happens in many places. The UK has a large, non-partisan civil service supporting whichever the government is in power.
But we don't let them decide our goals, because democracy is not primarily about choosing which way to solve widely-agreed problems. It's about deciding which things are in fact the problems that need solving. Training and skill are not critical to this.
Incompetence and inefficiency are secondary problems, and any attempt to fix them by weakening democracy itself is a dangerous project that puts the cart before the horse.
Infrastructure maintenance, for example.
Great idea! We can get everybody to vote on who those people are!
If you think some people are not educated enough to vote, then persuade them that they need to be educated.
When it comes to making policies on things like tax, healthcare, government spending, military intervention, etc, there are no right and wrong answers, just opinions. And often there are equally well-founded opinions that contradict each other.
Democracy solves that conundrum by getting both sides to appeal to the 'demos', with universal suffrage defining the demos as (almost) the entire adult population. How would you solve it?
> How would you solve it?
I wouldn't! I'm not remotely competent to do so. I think few people are, just as few people are competent to administer a large datacenter - a comparison to which I keep returning, because that's also a highly technical and rather abstruse specialty whose details and nuances are largely opaque to anyone not herself closely familiar with the task. But one need not be a skilled professional administrator to recognize that critical problems exist.
To keep with your comparison, restricting the right to vote is like restricting the right to switch datacentres. Restricting the right to stand in an election is like restricting the right to run my own datacentre.
Of course, in a nation state I can't secede and run my own government and that is the intractable problem. How do you administer a country with millions of people in such a way that all of them are happy with your administration? It's impossible, whichever system you choose.
Does it? There's that appointed civil service with which to contend, as another commenter mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and like any bureaucracy, one of its primary efforts is that of ensuring its own continuity through changes in the elected administration alongside which it operates. (Perhaps "above which", depending how much credence you give the idea that it's the civil service which actually runs a country, and the electees are more or less just there to amuse the proles. I've known a few civil servants who gave this idea considerable credence, which makes it difficult for me to dismiss out of hand.)
Even leaving that aside and assuming democracy works according to the junior high social studies model, to what extent does your vote enable you to predict a given candidate's behavior once elevated to office? Is there any reason at all, in the modern era, to imagine that we ever vote for anyone based on any real knowledge of how he or she will behave once elected? Why does the phrase "campaign promise" connote as it does?