I suppose you could extend that all the way back past the practice of voting... ultimately democratic voting isn't as good as some kind of scalable deliberative

I suppose you could extend that all the way back past the practice of voting... ultimately democratic voting isn't as good as some kind of scalable deliberative consensus mechanism that educates people, but we don't have one of those. But anyway, there's also a lot of misinformation out there about voting methods. For instance, most sources say that all Condorcet methods are flawed, but that's because they conflate Condorcet counting with the various tie-breaking methods when there are cycles. The latter can be flawed, but the former is not. If there's a Condorcet winner, it doesn't run afoul of Arrow's theorem or anything. The main "flaw" with a Condorcet winner is that you can have a Condorcet winner without that candidate having "majority approval", depending on how you measure "approval".