> This argument always comes up when discussing direct democracy or similar ideas, but it completely collapses under even the most basic scrutiny!
> Direct voting s strictly better than delegated voting, because you can always ... wait for it ... delegate your vote! You don’t care enough about the issue to educate yourself? Simply cast the vote for the option your government/party/favourite expert recommends! After all, you already trust them (otherwise you wouldn’t have voted for them), so by “delegating” your vote to them, is equivalent to not having the popular vote in the first place!
No, it very much stands up to "the most basic scrutiny". What it does not stand up to is a premature reply to an imagined argument that lacks a full understanding of the actual argument I was making. As I explained above: you might be in favor of an idea your party has, but you might also not want to bypass the legislature and lock the entire state into that decision. And you might not want your fellow citizens to lock you into a decision on that topic either. You might want to try out an idea but let the legislature improve things in the future. Or you might want to override the legislature temporarily, but allow them to change things after a few years have passed. You do not have this kind of flexibility with the current system. Voting with your party in favor of a measure bypassing and overriding your legislature is not the same thing as letting your party make that same decision in the legislature. It is far, far more risky and it ties the legislature's hands in the future.
There are also those who think the certain issues might deserve to be handled by a bipartisan legislature after a long period of consultation with experts, and not by a hasty party-line vote (or by popular vote). Though I guess the fact that this isn't even considered a possibility is itself rather telling.
Finally, the notion that anyone who hasn't sufficiently educated themselves on each topic to feel comfortable making a decision on it somehow "does not care enough" is a really juvenile way to look at this. As I (also) explained in my comment above, these issues can be complicated, with nontrivial, non-obvious implications. Experts (people who "care enough to educate themselves" on complicated topics) easily spend their entire careers working on some of these topics. And on top of that, many citizens simply cannot afford (financially or otherwise) to spend the days/weeks/months required to fully get to the bottom of each issue. That you prefer to regard everyone who doesn't come to complete confidence on every issue as lazy/ignorant/etc. does not make them so.
P.S. Your attempt at a trivial solution ("basic scrutiny"?) itself fails to account for the fact that people from the same party you like can appear on both sides of an issue. And it's also possible for your favorite party/representative not to have even made an endorsement.