WELL: I was thinking about the good comments on my post on raising the voting age to 21. I think there are two paradigmatic cases where we might think that a vote was less than desirable:
1. Someone gets into the voting booth, pulls out a quarter, and votes strictly based on whether heads or tails comes up.
2. The Ann Arbor Greenbelt being voted on by students (oddly like Jonah Goldberg's example in the original Amber Taylor post): students who will neither pay the taxes to fund the greenbelt nor be around to see it's effects for good or ill get to vote equally with people for whom this means their money and the neighborhoods they live in.
Maybe you think that neither one of these scenarios is sufficient reason to restrict the franchise somewhat. Perhaps you think no one is so disinvested in politics (if they actually bother to go and vote) as to let it be decided by the flip of a coin. But there's lots of reason to believe that people make decisions off of incomplete or incorrect information, or on deeply ingrained behavior patterns (everyone tends to vote like their parents, for example). You can oppose restrictions on the franchise for a lot of reasons, but not, I think, because a vote is a sacred embodiment of an individual's will about the direction their government should go in--there's just not a lot of evidence to suggest people process political decisions like that.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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