This approach seems overly mechanistic to me. You can have an election, and yet the results of said election can be completely predetermined like they have been

This approach seems overly mechanistic to me. You can have an election, and yet the results of said election can be completely predetermined like they have been in russia for the past 20 years or so. The US toyed with gerrymandering and disenfranchisement even before it officially embraced the current flavour of fascism. So the soil is fertile enough to take the next logic step towards a full dictatorship.