> Both the left and the right tend to claim that election results are rigged, but of course only when they don't like it.
I see considerable difference between "They lied to voters to get what they wanted" and "the counts are bogus because I don't like them" which still in 2022 appears to be a popular Republican position.
Not least practically the solutions are very different. Notice how the solution in the latter case is first pointless "audits", which maybe tells us that too many Republicans lack intro-to-arithmetic level understanding of how numbers work. Then though, attempts to stop people voting or to simply override the outcomes, with the effect that you get to "win" all subsequent elections regardless, thus quietly abolishing democracy...
Meanwhile a consequence of the former is that voters eventually realise they were lied to, but don't often get a do-over. People who've secured the vote they wanted will insist it's final and mustn't ever be reconsidered, I'd argue that's because they know they lied and the voters will eventually realise too so they don't want democracy any more.
By the time Brexit was "delivered" many of those who'd voted for it understood they'd been lied to, and the numbers keep going up, but you won't find many politicians with any interest in revisiting, not least because many of them got very wealthy betting against their own country's economy knowing it would be destroyed.
Turns out that you can get turkeys to vote for Christmas (hmm, is that a saying in the US, or do you say "Thanksgiving" here?), but, many of the turkeys are not so happy about that once they realise their fate.
> Both sides have to trust the voters may know what they want and perhaps it wasn't the money or the articles that drove the election results, but policies.
I don't agree that we need to just trust. We should work hard to ensure voters are better informed where possible, and - which is important here - we should use direct democracy (ie voting on issues like this proposition) only sparingly if at all. The reason we have elected representatives is so that they can dedicate their working lives to actually caring about these decisions. Are some of them corrupt? Incompetent? Lunatics? Sure, but replacing those representatives based on their character is an easier vote than having all these propositions.
I remember lots of friends were very happy when the Republic of Ireland got rid of its constitutional prohibition on abortion which they did via direct democracy. But I saw this as cowardly. The politicians didn't want to face the Catholic Church and a minority of potentially violent anti-abortion campaigners, so they said "Give it to the people".