We’ve never really had an “honest” election process. The US has never been a democracy, because it was born of bourgeois revolution[1], and its laws & institutions were crafted by and for the bourgeoisie. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote.

[Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy