So? They were still elected by popular vote. The fact that votes were grouped in a certain way doesn't suddenly change the system from democracy to something else.
If you demand that all matters must be decided by simple-majority popular vote in order to call a government "democratic" then there has never been a democratic government in all of history. Even Ancient Athens had assemblies, councils, tribunals, and other elected offices.
In the centuriate assembly, senators + equites, a few thousand men among several million citizens, represented a majority of the votes (98 of the 193 tribes). This is pretty much a textbook oligarchy.
The Centuriate assembly was only used to elect three offices: consuls, praetors, and censors.
The plebian assembly, where all votes are equal and senators and equites aren't allowed, elected Tribunes who had an absolute veto over all government activity, including the senate and the consuls, and controlled the treasury.
This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy. You can't just ignore the rest of the government and its other electoral mechanisms.
No, the voting was by tribe, with the vast majority of voters crammed into the 4 urban tribes and the wealthy were enrolled in 31 much smaller rural tribes.
> and senators and equites aren't allowed.
Sure they were, as long as they were not patrician. By the first century BC, the vast majority of senators were plebeian.
> This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy.
The US indeed has oligarchic tendencies already. Now imagine if the constitution guaranteed that citizens with $1M+ in property had 50+% of the vote, and that your "state" was not determined primarily by residence, but anybody without substantial property was automatically registered in California, Texas, or New York...
For some values of "majority vote". The voting was by centuries / tribes, both of them being extremely unbalanced in voting power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republi...