Reflecting on the recent Aussie election and the not-so-recent US presidential election. Then comparing this to what I've learned about democratisation in open source over the last several years. We avoid votes in these projects because a vote means that there is a winner and a loser. If you're on the losing side, your position is now discarded and irrelevant. The situation has been solved by "democracy" but if your position was in the minority the decision is permanent and you're powerless to change it. The only alternatives in open source are to fork or abandon.
The takeaway message is that democracy has a serious flaw - it allows tyranny by the majority against a minority. In governmental elections over time these two sides will be nearly evenly divided so half the population is subject to the ruling party's rules for a few years until they switch sides again, and then the roles are reversed. In each case the ruling party creates legislation favourable to their party and tries to lock it in so that it is difficult or impossible to reverse when the government toggles sides again.
It's difficult to govern fairly based on such a flip-flop system.
I'm not at this time offering an alternative. The only political system that even acknowledges this potentially fatal flaw in democracy is parpolity and it appears to just move the problem to branch nodes rather than infecting the trunk. It's decentralised, which is good in theory, but you could end up with "the Mastodon problem" where nodes with different viewpoints feel they have to isolate themselves from other participants in the system. In sci-fi the "advanced" governments were always "councils of elders" and maybe there's some way to make that work.
I just don't think that representing millions or hundreds of millions of people in a single figurehead who ridicules and is opposed to the aspirations of half the population is the best system that humans can come up with.