Althea —

I’m with you that it’s frustrating that people don’t pay more attention to local and state politics, especially since they’re the people who really make decisions on your behalf. It’s baffling to me that people pay so much attention to the person who has limited power and no ability to create legislative acts (and limited ability to scrap them), and not to the people actually writing and voting on them.

I disagree that democracy works in theory only, though. The bare-bones definition of democracy is a government that is based on the consent of the people and holds regular and “fair” elections; fair at least in the sense that there are specific rules governing them and the rules are enforced.

You can’t really say that democracy guarantees that the people will make “good” or informed choices on who represents them, only that they have the opportunity to help make the choice.