Yes. Consider that attractive candidates get two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Consider that most voters have very little or no knowledge

Yes. Consider that attractive candidates get two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Consider that most voters have very little or no knowledge of most policy and issues. Most voters can't name their representatives even. Most just blindly vote for one party or issue. It's still better than nondemocratic systems I guess. But that's a terribly low bar to pass. That's not something to be proud of. Everyone always says that it's the best system of government that has been tried. Well maybe we aren't trying hard enough! There are other systems, and here are a few that are my personal favorites. My ideal system of government has no politicians. It forms a parliament or congress just like normal, but the representatives are sampled randomly from the population. Ideally they would be filtered for IQ or education, but this is optional. And then they would debate and vote on issues, without having party loyalty, and without having to pander to the general population. It's sort of like direct democracy, but the random sampling lets it scale to much larger populations. I also really like the model of the supreme court. I have to say that every supreme court decision I've looked into, they seem remarkably rational and competent. They aren't perfect of course, but it seems so much better than congress. Statistics show that even biased judges tend to become much less biased by the time they retire. I'm not sure how they accomplish this. My guess is the lifetime appointments, and the structure of the court being to debate issues extensively, and for the judges to at least try to weigh them objectively. I would love to try a system of government modelled after something like the Supreme court. There is futarchy, proposed by Robin Hanson. The idea is to use prediction markets to make predictions about the future, like whether policies will actually work. Then voters can vote on values ('I approve of Brexit, conditional on it being predicted to increase median wages.') But they bet on beliefs. Another idea I like is the "Ideological Turing Test". In this case representatives can vote on policy just like normal. But they have to pass a test that proves they fully understand the other side's point of view. By writing arguments for the other side of the argument, and blinded reviewers not being able to tell if it's authentic or not. This would be complicated to implement without people gaming the system, but I think it's worth a try. There is also alternative voting systems. These are just small modifications of regular democracy. They modify the voting system so you can vote for third parties without being punished for splitting the vote.