Second, those voting should be competent, should be capable of understanding relevant information and using that information to make decisions that are for our own good and the general good.

We in the U.S. are not doing that quite as well.

We establish a minimum voting age and teach government classes in high school and college to try to guarantee that voters will be able to understand information and vote rationally. But age is only loosely connected to the sort of informed maturity we are talking about, and the classes in school produce more knowledge than wisdom.

Third, those making decisions in a well-functioning democracy make their decisions based on all the relevant information and only the relevant information.

We in the U.S. are not doing very well at all on this standard. We have too little information, too much information, and too much of a push toward irrelevant information.

About some things we seldom have enough reliable information. For example, when both houses of Congress voted in October 2002 to give President Bush the authority to use force against Iraq, they were doing so with very little real information about Iraq. They were told things -- lies, stretches of the truth -- but they had very little real information about what was going on in Iraq.

(I am using "information" in the standard dictionary sense of facts or data, something that is true. A report that purports to be information but is false is not information at all.)

We have presidential candidates who take the words of others out of context or even just plain lie about their opponents.

We have "swiftboating" directed against John Kerry four years ago and against John McCain last week.

Locally, too, we have had people support the industrial wind development by saying things such as "There is no evidence that industrial wind turbines cause cancer." But opponents have never suggested that turbines cause cancer, and to suggest that people have opposed wind development for that reason is to try to get people to believe something that is not true. It is what the Bible calls "bearing false witness."

Sometimes we have too much information. Both a blessing and a curse of a world that has a digital nervous system is the way we have all kinds of information at our fingertips. We have so much that we have a hard time sorting it out, analyzing it, synthesizing it, using it.

But maybe even more of our failure comes from the way people try to steer us away from the relevant information. Potential candidates try to get us to support them because they say a few key words -- "family values," "change," "experience," "Ronald Reagan," "9/11" -- rather than because they actually have good ideas about how to bring these values to bear on the difficult problems we face.

We have lots of relevant information, and we have some people or institutions who are genuinely trying to help us see what is true and what is false, what it means and what it doesn't mean.

(And in this regard I want to thank and congratulate the Washington Post for its support of the Fact Checker and the Annenberg Foundation for Political Fact Check. Both seem to do a pretty good job in a nonpartisan way of confirming or disconfirming claims that presidential candidates make about each other.)

But overall, we in the U.S. are having a pretty hard time getting the information we need if we are to make rational decisions.

There is a fourth characteristic, too, that a well-functioning democracy must have. Its operations must not commit the people of the country to participating in immoral actions.

And on that score, we in the U.S. are doing terribly. There are many evil things that our system of government, economics, and society has produced.

From the killing of the unborn to the killing of the Iraqis, from the exploitation of the poor in the U.S. to the exploitation of third-world nations, we are involved in a system of systems that is doing wrong.

Of course, it is not clear that other nations are doing too much better. And our involvement in evil does not show that we are not also involved in good.

Are the Iraqi people ready for democracy? Are we?

I think the jury is still out.