It sounds as if you're in favour of a coalition government in the absence of a significant margin.
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)...