I know how I would set things up. But in the vast majority of cases there are objectively good and bad policies and the fact that people voted doesn't change whether something is a good idea or not. Nobody's voting in China as far as I know and they've seeing unbelievable rates of improvement in their living standards for the last few decades, it isn't that hard.

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...