This. If you're so unshakably convinced that a government full of people you vote for every four years is never going to work in your interests, you have serious problems.
"If you [1] are so unshakably convinced that a government full of people you [2] vote for every four years is never going to work in your [3] interests, you [4] have serious problems."
1. the person reading this
2. the majority of voters in your country, which the person reading this is only likely to be a part of about 50% of the time at best, in the US
3. the person reading this
4. the person reading this
Looking at just US presidential elections, people who vote straight Republican or Democrat will have been in the majority at least some of the time, but someone voting their conscience without regard to party has a fair chance of having been in the minority most of the time.
Another problem is that voting gives an individual neither control over nor responsibility for anything that the elect do. Look at all the Bush voters outraged about what happened during that administration (either Bush, actually), and all the Obama voters currently outraged about current administration activities.
As in those "get the government out of my medicare" signs that were seen in the US.
(Cue the "blah blah markets can do it blah blah" responses - no, I'm sorry, but even economists disagree with you.)
Using these services because there's no practical way not to is just the reality of our system. Taking a few scraps from your masters to survive does not mean you agree with your chains.
And I don't have any proposals for how those services will be provided. People will just figure it out and create solutions organically, as they have for numerous other problems throughout history. We didn't need to know how cotton would be picked before we abolished slavery.
The number of non-elected officials is vastly larger than the few thousand elected officials people vote for.
Not that governments (and other bureaucratic bodies) never work in your interests. They always work in their own interests, and among these are self-perpetuation and grabbing more power. But as long as their other interests are aligned with yours, they could throw all their power at your cause. Should your interests diverge... well, good luck.
You mean a government full of people I vote against every four years, right? I actually don't vote any more, but back when I did, the people I voted for were never the ones who won the election. (At least not at the national level. There might have been a local one, though not any I can recall offhand.)
But even if my favored candidate had ever won, there are good public choice reasons to think the system as a whole would resist serving my interests ahead of its own. We have a "government by the government, for the government" - a vast barnacle feeding off the economy, trying to take as many resources as it can without killing the host.
People work in their own interest (however they may define that). Working in the interests of those that elect them is just a hopeful side effect of the democratic process.