I'm disinclined to agree here. Literacy tests for political participation have a very nasty history. Even if they could be administered fairly, they still disenfranchise people who need representation within the system.
Here's how I'd do it. Scrap the current system and replace it with an acyclical directed graph for each individual decision to come before the government.
Now, if I like, I can decide for myself whether my vote will be in the "yay" or "nay" column. Or, I can point my vote toward some other person or organization. If a million people want the ACLU to represent them in all their votes, they would effectively be a voting block unto themselves. If your neighbor decides to give you her vote because she doesn't care about politics, but thinks you can be trusted to represent her convictions, then she can.
You could elaborate the system by allowing multiple pointers based on the type of issue. I might assign my votes on copyright law to Cory Doctorow, who might assign his votes to the EFF. The trick would be categorizing things in a concrete way, since many bills might touch on multiple subjects.
The system is much more flexible and responsive than the current American system, where all our votes are assigned to whoever won our congressional district, for a set period of 2 years. Under my system, if your representative isn't going to vote your way, you can immediately nerf them.
I haven't really thought about how legislation actually gets created, or how the decision is made to bring a particular bill to a vote at a particular time. But I'm imagining that bills could be created by anyone; you could put your vote(s) on the pile at any time, and a formal vote might be triggered whenever the yea votes reached some threshold (say, 40M votes).
You could argue that this will give too much power to those who are too lazy to get involved and study the issues. Perhaps. But I think that knowing that you can put your decisions into effect immediately would make it more rewarding to be involved in the political process.
You could also argue that Glenn Beck would be swinging a million votes around. I have no answer to this argument, as it is absolutely devastating. Seriously, though, it's possible that some dangerous forms of populism would emerge. But I'm intrigued by the idea of letting coalitions emerge and dissipate.
Hmm... I haven't really given much thought to ballot secrecy either. That could really put a spanner in things.
