People are lazy. You can rile them up to get critical mass for an action every now and then, but you can't sustain it forever.
I still don't understand why lobbying - a socially accepted form of corruption - still exists, without being questioned. Even more so as, today, everybody knows that 1% control most of the wealth == lobbying == legislation == our lives.
The intent of lobbying is to inform elected officials about issues that they do not necessarily know anything about. The bribery aspect really has more to do with campaign contributions than lobbying, though lobbying can indirectly use those contributions, as well as a lot of societal norms to get its own way (you spend a lot of time discussing issues with someone, even when that someone is biased, and it's a bit rude to vote against them).
Without lobbyists, we have a bunch of uninformed, extremely partisan, mostly white, mostly old, mostly men deciding law, and that's probably even worse.
I don't know the fix; certainly, limiting the amount of lobbying corporations can do is likely part of it, but I would not want to also limit the ability of the ACLU and EFF from being able to talk to Congress, either.
Verification of votes would be very possible. If it did get hacked then fix the security hole, wipe the system, and vote again.
It would never happen because of self-interest in congress and they'd argue "but normal citizens are too dumb to decide for themselves".
People need to pay more attention to what the government is doing, pretty much all the time, and at every level of government. It would also be nice if people were a little more willing to consider that permission from 51% is still some pretty shitty permission.
I think having a Constitutional Court that verifies every single bill that passes through Congress and administration, and has final say on whether a bill is going to become law or not, would be a decent solution for an out of control Congress and administration that don't even care if their laws are Constitutional or not anymore.
This is not to "replace" the Supreme Court, or any other Court. this is in addition to them. A Constitutional Court could filter out a lot of the bad bills, before they ever had to reach the Supreme Court for their unconstitutionality. With a Constitutional Court something like the Patriot Act or FAA might've never passed, and we wouldn't have to endure it for 20 years before it even reaches the Supreme Court, to decide its constitutionality.
But what happens if a Constitutional Court allows a "bad bill" to pass anyway, you ask? Well, nothing different than right now. It goes out there, and eventually someone sues over it, and it goes through the same process up to the Supreme Court, if it's that bad. The point of the Constitutional Court wouldn't be to "set a precedent" but to filter out at least 90 percent of bad/unconstitutional bills coming out from Congress. Other than that, everything else will work as normal.
The system is already used in many European countries, and I think it would work well for US, too. Without it a lot of EU countries would probably have a lot worse justice system, since they don't even have the precedent thing, which means that if a lot more bad bills were allowed to go through, they would have a lot more judges split on the decisions, and more unconstitutional laws would be allowed to continue for more years. But the Constitutional Court filters out most of those, so the judges can only be split on a few of the bad ones.
That's not to say I don't like the idea of a constitutional court, though. I just think we need to also add some sort of protections against blatantly unconstitutional actions.
I think a far more effective solution would be to require all laws be version controlled on a publicly available site. Something like github for Congress. No more need to reference Act 737 Paragraph 3 section 2 part H. It's just a diff at that point. It would make it very clear who is proposing changes to what. Combine passage with a code review process so that everyone can see who voted for/against/abstain and why for everything, ever.
The NSA can view the totality of everything we do. Why are we still unable to view the totality of what Congress is up to? 300,000,000 Americans private lives are under total surveillance, while we can't even monitor the supposedly public activity of a measly 600 people.