I think the only way to improve things is to have a representative based system. Local community picks a rep, sends them to a higher level meeting, all the chosen reps pick a rep from among them to send to the next level, repeat and scale the number of layers as needed. Then there’s no mystery because everyone at each level knows who they agreed to send to represent them.

This was how the US Constitution was designed by the smart people, before various idiots screwed it up with the 17th Amendment and Permanent Apportionment Act. Your US representative was supposed to represent about ~30,000 people and your state representatives even fewer than that. Now each representative represents close to a million.

So glad to see others calling-out the Permanent Apportionment Act. Maybe it made sense in a world without communications technology, but today we're able to scale to the numbers needed to support that ratio of representatives:constituents.

Would the House be more or less effective if there were 10,000+ representatives to meet the 30,000:1 ratio in the original Constitutional setup?

More, because the House is not a deliberative body. Reps could stay in their districts and just vote online.

The episode "Power To The People" in the satirical comedy Yes Prime Minister deals with exactly this. It also looks at the trade-offs, which explains why this will almost certainly not actually happen. Well worth a watch :-)

https://archive.org/details/yes-prime-minister-power-to-the-...

Can't this system work:

- You publish a public list of randomly generated numbers/IDs (the number of IDs corresponding to the number of eligible voters, guess you need a reasonably accurate census data for this)

- Divide up into subsets and distribute these IDs to each voting booth.

- When you go to vote you draw on of those numbers and attach it to your vote.

- Election results are published as "ID X voted for Y".

Now everyone can check that their vote was counted, and everyone can check that the original list of of IDs matches the final results (or in reality, count(final list) < count(original list) since not everyone votes).

This is an open ballot, which has it's own set of problems like vote buying and voter intimidation.

Nobody but you would know your id though.

Anybody trying to intimidate you or buy your vote could demand you prove you voted correctly by giving your number.

These things may seem farfetched, but happen very often in certain parts of the world.

Here very recently the Federal Road Administration was caught stopping buses in regions where the left leaning presidential candidate had the strongest support. We also had a few tens of cases where business owners were discussing strategies on how to get their employees to vote for the right-wing candidate, and some strategies depended on breaking the law by taking you smartphone to the voting booths and taking a picture (breaking the law in the process).

.. in a country where many people think ¼ is bigger than ⅓.

Seriously. We are talking about people who would claim rain is not wet, while it pours down their face if it was somehow helping them "owning" the other side. No clever system is going to fix people not wanting democracy anymore.

This is an issue of decades of uncontrolled "news" media and a lack of education and the US is going to harvest the fruit of that neglect for the next decades at least.

It might be my education about the roots of fascism that I got by growing up within the borders of former Nazi Germany, but US democracy is in an extremely dangerous spot right now. The specific mixture of economic pressures, media bubbles, lack of education, corrupt political actors and processes and split culture is a volatile explosive mix.

The problem is that people still won’t trust it.

If votes are on the public record it becomes too easy to directly buy or even coerce votes from people.

It is anti-democratic to have open ballots, because then people are not free to vote their conscience.