I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. An individual choosing between two products on the shelf is much simpler than an individual changing government.

For instance if I think scrapping the department of energy would make things work better, how can I get that done?

I can't. It's impossible. If HP doesn't make a laptop I like however, I can buy a Dell.

Besides the obviously classist implications of voting with your wallet (i.e. people with bigger wallets get more votes, vimes' boot theory, etc) we also already have evidence that it just doesn't work in this specific type of product. Go ahead and try going to Best Buy and getting a non-smart TV. You can't, because once one manufacturer comes up with a dark pattern, they all copy it. "Consumer choice" is an illusion for almost everything these days.

Searching "Dumb TV" on the best buy site brings up plenty of models. I went into the reviews of the first few to verify they were in fact non smart models.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?st=Dumb+tv&_dync...