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The problem is that the people making the bad decisions and the people suffering for those decisions are not the same people.

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The people suffering elected the people who made the bad decisions.

Of course the people they elected ran on detailed platform of how to use derivatives to fund infrastructure projects and those voters are very familiar with complex financial instruments!

I don't think it is asking too much to not elect people who will be bribed into screwing you over. At the community level candidate integrity should still be measurable. But the likely problem, given voter apathy, is not that they elected the losers, but that they sat by and allowed them to be elected.

I was in the UK when they had their lowedt voter turnout since World War 2. A couple of months later 9/11 happened and Tony Blair was leading the country into war. All of a sudden a lot of people who hadn't voted were saying "hang on... we're not sure we want this muppet in charge during wartime".

The problem is that not all elections are equally important, and it is easy for the voters to either (a) go to sleep at the wheel or (b) vote themselves more pork.

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