Democracy is a great good, it builds in feedback from every member of society to its leadership as it tries to neutralize greed and maximize social coherence. It is also an experiment because it relies on a number of factors that are not spontaneous, like a decent leven of education, good journalism and news services, usefull activities for all. You may guess where we’re going with this : Modern fossil capatalist society is not an ideal substrate for democracy.
The truth is that no matter how much rules you make, when those in the system are fundamentally opposed to its order and structure, you are not going to win. Dictators know that once you start applying force you have to become really invasive into lives and even then you can not expect stability. People hate to be forced, the best way to keep people from revolting is to keep them happy. This is hard now because we are all fighting over a scarce resource, fossil fuels, and this scarcity is increasing, to include water, arable land, so food, tolerable temperatures.
If you look at the US system you can observe the ‘republicans’ are eating it alive. They are now even postponing elections to allow them to appoint judges, who will then allow more erosion of rights. The wolfs are in the henhouse, and the farmer is not paying attention. This will end badly, because the forces at play with Turmp etc. do not care about anything besides being in control. It’s the joke of the guy in the castings still mad at his molestor. You can reach a point where there is no way to regain ground no matter how angry you get.
So how to improve the situation? First off, as democrats you have to remove yourself from the money game. You have to declare yourself incorruptable by fixing your income for at least 20 years or so. People vote or don’t vote, that’s easy and cheap, but no endless adds online or elsewhere. This something few people will do though, and an already corrupt system can only become more corrupt as it uses its immoral attitude to gather more perks and rewards.
Another approach is to fix a flaw in the democratic process : We collect opinions, but don’t read the feedback from the community. We pretend money is a feedback mechanism that will inform us if policies are good or bad, but how would that work, except for companies? Do people start to spend more if they feel better? Not if they don’t have any money! There is a correlation, but why not simply investigate how they feel. This is pretty easy, fitbits everywhere these days. Questions like “Are you happy” “Who do you thank for your happiness” “What measure HAS attributed to your happiness” Always in the past, because this is a real measurement. Lies won’t work (although hypnosis would go a long way). So many interactions in our lives are monitored these days. The voting ballot could even be used to gauge wellbeing.
Another approach could be to allow for direct sacking of political figures. The criterium must be that a sizable portion of people that voted for the elected official can revoke their vote. With immediate effect. This creates a system a lot like Athens real democracy, where decisions where reversed and those involved in the process would reconsider their priorities based on circumstances. The US with it’s fake 50/50 divided electorate cold send Trump or McConnel or Pelosi home. Negative elections, deelections, demotions of poltical figures is something that would really help remove the cruel and insensitve lakeys from the public arena.