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Notes -
This seems to be based on an assumption that voter's judgement has a significant impact on the politicians the US winds up electing, which strikes me as unproven and not at all obviously true, considering the extreme filtering effect of money, inside baseball in the nominating parties, and primaries. There's an alternative model which I find more plausible to represent reality, which is that quality of candidates is almost entirely determined by these other processes, and the final voting only serves to shift the incentive gradient that the politicians who get into positions of power either way will have to follow. That is to say, to a coarse approximation, letting the smartest 10% vote would result in the same politicians getting into power, but they now would only have to make the smartest 10% happy; conversely, expanding the franchise to felons would result in the same politicians getting into power, but now they would also have to consider making felons happy to the same extent as they do for the average mediocre and uninfluential free citizen. It does not seem to me that the bad judgement of felons is a relevant counterargument in the latter scenario.
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