Well it wasn't Ben Franklin: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ection/321393/
From the moment President Obama was reelected, disgruntled conservatives began circulating a quote heralding democracy's downfall at the hands of greedy voters. We hate to break it to them in their time of mourning, but their favorite bit of historical wisdom is fabricated.
Spend three minutes surfing the conservative web today, and you're likely to come across variants of this quote, usually attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, maybe even a couple times: