Its been my understanding that political parties have interests that are completely separate from the will of the people, even though campaigns say otherwise, and no amount of change is going to fix that problem.
Also any changes that come from those institutions follow the real progress that gets made by common people.
"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote." - Henry David Thoreau
In DPRK there is only one choice on the ballot that you can optionally cross out to disapprove. That doesn't happen often or at all; I suppose they'd know who does it based on the time it takes to vote.
What do you mean by this? If I (a dictator) were to hold an election but require 90% approval to unseat me, that would be a "legitimate" process because it includes voting?
Do you not understand what I am saying?
> What about protesting the system by not voting, does that do anything?
Arguably yes. Afghanistan's state legitimacy collapsed as basically fewer than 10% of people voted in any of it's elections and then the government fell.
The fall of the government in Kabul. I'm not saying this is the single causal event, but lower than 10% voting definitely contributed to a lack of legitimacy of the central govt leading to its fall.
The way they've done it for decades where I live, is party A and party B serve the same master on all substantial issues, so pick a "hot button" social issue that neither side will ever do anything about and have A and B take opposing views. Then do some gatekeeping where both parties and the media agree to push hard propaganda that voting 3rd party is "throwing your vote away".
The people in charge are the ones who pick the two almost identical candidates. There will be no change in economic or foreign policy regardless of winner.
(Edited, the other way is to push hard core identity politics where demographic groups are owned by certain parties, so voting has all the legitimacy of a mere census. The only way to influence policy would be having (or not having) children)
If you disagree with both of those things, voting has no positive and results only in negatives.