Comment by Retric
18 days ago
Selecting who is eligible to vote is one of the most obvious ways to manipulate the outcome. At the extreme, you can have large scale slavery in a system with voting, but it’s not a Democracy.
Who gets to decide on expanding an interstate or zoning has a huge impact when the votes are counted, so drawing lines on a map is suddenly where the power lies not with the people.
Democracy falls apart when the vast majority of people just don't give a care.
And with representative democracy, it's impossible to give a care about more than one or two things.
Democracy needs to exist before it can fail, but there’s a wide range of systems possible that will give more or less power to the general public.
Representative democracy tends to large numbers of parties with proportional representation give far more power to the voters than a two party first past the post voting system. On the other hand having zero input on who specifically ends up being a representative is problematic in a different way.
It’s interesting just how many different reasonable systems you can come up with and how few of them have ever actually been tried.