It feels very wrong that I can do a ton of research on candidates, dig into their backgrounds, do my homework and yet I have the exact same voting power as someone who is filling in ovals because the candidate hits some demographic

I refuted this with point 1. You can complain that it is unfair, but you have no alternative, just grievances. What? Do you want us to do dressed-up literacy tests like had been used to further-marginalize minorities for so long in America? For our trouble, we would get the grand accomplishment of giving tremendously disproportionate power to the fucking lanyards who, surprise surprise, don't actually want pro-social policy just because they score far above the average in their awareness of the policies of candidates and so on, and in many cases score far above you.

Who writes and evaluates the tests? Whatever you claim the answer is, the ultimate answer is "bureaucrats," because a ruling minority who gets to decide the terms of qualifying for being in the ruling minority is a bureaucracy, and the majority being able to decide and re-decide the terms will, on the basis of class interests, will come to reflect the ruling class's interests.

Maybe political equality is unfair, but so is the inexorable march of entropy. It's a cost of existing in the real world and not being able to just wave a wand to make things however you personally want with magic.

the candidate hits some demographic (I've heard voters vote for only women for example) or has a certain letter next to their name of because they were the first person on the list (yes that actually happens and there's a small advantage to being on top of the list on a ballot). People don't vote when it's raining outside. People vote "how Jesus told me to vote".

People voted for Kamala in 2024 simply because she was black. Some simply because she was a woman. Some voted against her simply for those reasons.

I refuted this line of argument with point 2, which you never even attempted to address. The ruling ideological paradigm is backwards and most people follow one of the manifold versions of still just supporting rancid neoliberals or theocrats. You have failed to make any attempt to understand why this is the case beyond the most intellectually lazy and epistemically worthless and elitist conclusion:

People ARE fucking stupid and I have a lifetime of dealing with these people to back that up.

. . . most people are sheep . . .

Your position is indefensibly reactionary, and being able to point at people making foolish or false claims is just completely failing to understand the terms of the argument in favor of saying their souls are wrong and yours is better. Until you make a more serious attempt to understand why people are the way they are (and no, it's not their inherent inferiority to you), you are just going to be making the same arguments that heinous supremacists have made since the written word was invented.

But people who know nothing about how the world works or are blindly following whatever because most people are sheep... well they vote and they outnumber people like us who have put in the hours and studied, read books, learned all of the history, etc. So stupid wins.

What books? What history? You clearly are no Marxist, nor an anarchist, nor do you seem to have a grasp of "all of the history" or you'd understand that technocracy is a farcical dead end, just like all of these misanthropic screeds.

I can't ever afford a house no matter how hard I work because Cletus and his 12 kids outnumber me and the Baptist Evangelical church they all go to told them to vote Republican. I'm sick of it!

And I'm sick of people mistaking Idiocracy for serious political analysis, but we can't always get what we want.

As kind of an aside, besides all the other issues with complaining about the "stupidity of the masses" and so on, you're also missing that intelligence has very little to do with it because you don't need to be a policy wonk to support better policy, and in fact most people who support better policy aren't policy wonks (and for several major policies, this includes most Americans!). The fundamental difference between you and them isn't that you're so much smarter, it's that you were met with conditions that pushed you against the status quo. We can make some tedious argument about the precise threshold is affected by intelligence, but it's missing the forest for the trees, the forest in this analogy being that humans are continuously shaped and re-shaped by their circumstances.