The reality is that most people that vote do not know all that much about anything materially helpful from a geopolitical standpoint (many politicians themselve

The reality is that most people that vote do not know all that much about anything materially helpful from a geopolitical standpoint (many politicians themselves included I'll assert) and are basically low-information, single-issue voters that get pandered to in elections, unfortunately. While some arbitrary criteria is needed to keep people voting on issues that they have no information about (although I argue many 15 year olds are better informed than many 51 year olds, the average 15 year old is definitely not while we have some debate on the 51 year olds), establishing some "knowledge test" or something similar for voting is how we lose the basic foundations of democracy. What really needs to be done particularly in the US is increased voter motivation because low turn-outs are not helping anything at all here. People don't want to talk politics out of "politeness" or something other passive policy and the country continues to have trouble talking about hard issues without leading to emotionally charged methods of "argument" that have led us to the current state of things with low voter engagement and politics devolving into a minstrel show of democracy.