WACO, Texas - Over the last four years American taxpayers have given the government billions of dollars to buy new voting machines and upgraded election assistance.

A lot of that money purchased fancy electronic touch-screen voting machines and other advanced equipment designed to prevent a repetition of Florida's election fiasco in the last presidential race.

The voting reform most needed is the one that costs little and that the government has the least control over.

Americans need to independently inform themselves about the candidates, the issues and the election process.

The problem with this reform is that it requires effort. Too many Americans are willing to let their private decisions be guided by campaign commercials and political sales pitches that wash over them in a campaign race.

This isn't a good way to buy a car, much less elect a president or decide a bond issue.

Ideally, voter education would not be a cram course immediately before election day, although a cram course is better than trusting a television commercial or a talking head with a political agenda.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, feared for the future of the new democratic government he helped establish if Americans failed to inform themselves about the candidates and the issues.

In addition, of course, citizens empowered with knowledge of the candidates and issues then must go to the polls on election day and cast their informed ballots.

America's democracy was won on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War and preserved in blood in subsequent wars. But, advised Jefferson, the greatest threat to America's experiment in self-government would come from the ignorance of its own citizens.

Jefferson warned that self-government and ignorance are mutually exclusive. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be," he said.

The problem, as Jefferson saw it, was that citizens too lazy to become well-informed become easy prey for political manipulators who will form a despotic government for their own benefit and deprive the citizens of their liberties.

Jefferson was such a strong believer in his premise that an informed electorate was necessary to sustain democratic self-government that he proposed a constitutional amendment to legalize federal support for education. That proposal failed but his conviction that citizens can only protect their freedoms if they can cast informed ballots never wavered.

Even with nationwide public schools, repeated surveys show Americans are woefully ignorant of both the candidates and the issues that impact their daily lives.

Only 30 percent of voters, according to the Cato Institute, know about the new highly controversial Medicare prescription drug benefit. And the list goes on.

Whether ignorant or well-informed, Americans do a poor job exercising their civic responsibility to vote. U.S. voter participation among eligible voters in presidential elections has fallen from around 63 percent in post-World War II elections to barely 50 percent in recent elections.

That puts the United States, with the world's oldest sustained democracy, toward the bottom of all the world's democratic governments in voter turnout.

Being one of Jefferson's well-informed citizens should include a daily habit of keeping up with current issues in local, state and federal governments. Actually getting involved in some of those issues promotes understanding and citizenship.

Voters informed about the candidates, the issues and the voting process can do a better job protecting their liberties than the legions of lawyers prepared to file lawsuits on their behalf.