It's a shame they couldn't have ended the Electoral College error. It's very frustrating knowing how much better things could've turned out if the people who won the popular vote had been able to take office instead of the losers.
"Haha, we have 50.5% of the vote now you have to do what we say" is workable but hardly a stronger moral position than securing 49.5% - particularly after looking at the turnout situation in the US. Philosophically if there is less than overwhelming majorities (talking 60%, 70% style figures) there is a lot of room to question whether a democratic consensus has been achieved.
The issue is that the political class (really any group of people) is inevitably stuffed with corrupt sociopaths, tends towards groupthink, is easily dissociated from reality and insists on using social proof rather than a scientific approach. The system as it stands is just a big complicated stick to wallop them with a Trump every so often if they really muck things up to the point where their incompetence triggers too many problems for enough people. The exact trigger % of people needed to engage the stick should be set sensibly but in practice the US is making do with around 20% of the population according to Wikipedia [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
The key point is we don't need to vote to determine what works well. Whether a policy gets good results is just a fact regardless of whether or not people vote for it. And there are a large number of policies that were terrible the last time people tried them and will continue to be terrible even if the voting public decides to try them again.
They vote from an approved list of candidates, but the following makes it sound as if, in principle anyway, there ought to be enough voting to keep the better apparatchiks and bounce the worse ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China#Direct_elec...
tl;dr: lots of voting; no ballot access
EDIT: meanwhile, over on https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中華人民共和國選舉 we find the Party line:
> 《人民日報》称，中国大陸的基层换届选举是世界上规模最大的基层民主选举。
("The People's Daily* says the grass-roots general elections in mainland China are the largest [900 million voters] grass-roots democratic elections in the world.")
Have you checked with the Lords of Instrumentality? (Did 101 speak with the equivalent of a midwestern accent?)
I wonder if he might have killed another Lord o.I. — where is the which of the what-he-did?
(the World Controllers have an excuse not to offer proper Bildung; the Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality have no such)
Come to think of it, Goethe (1749-1832) was about the same age as Linebarger (1913-1966) when he started on Faust (ca 1800)...
The United States of America is exactly what it says: A Union of sovereign States. It's very sad a lot of people don't understand this because they slept through civics/history class.
The 538 Electors are derived from the 435 Representatives and 100 Senators in Congress, with an additional 1 Representative and 2 Senators equivalents in Electors allocated to the District of Columbia (specifically the same count as the least populous State in the Union, currently Rhode Island with 1 Representative and 2 Senators).
That means of the 538 Electors, 436 of them are allocated according to State population counts as recorded in the United States Census taken every 10 years.
The state level of government feels more and more like a historic novelty carried over as "we always did it this way" and "it would require far too much political capital to touch"-- America's answer to the House of Lords or the Governor General.
The United States of America is a very vast country literally spanning an entire continent, State sovereignty is more important now than ever before because the needs and desires of the peoples within them can and will vary wildly from each other; they varied wildly with just 13 States across the eastern seaboard, let alone 50 States spanning a continent and islands in the Pacific.
The Federal government exists to better enable functions of government where the States have a unanimous consensus, and to that end the Federal government including the Presidency exists strictly at the pleasure of the States. For all other matters where States can and will disagree, the States reserve the power to decide by themselves for themselves.