but e.g. Australia has a great voting system (on all levels from the voting rules to the election day administration), yet they still seem to have fairly screwed up partisan politics.
i think it might improve things but wouldn't help make politics fundamentally better.
A more democratic process doesn't in any way guarantee better government. I guess we all ideologically believe that, on balance, over the log run, democracy tends to produce better outcomes than the alternatives, but it's very noisy. Sometimes (not too infrequently, in fact) the people want the screwed up partisan politics.
This is largely due to the media environment (Murdoch) being full of disception. Also, many Australians are politically unengaged. Even the highly educated ones. I have friends and family who are engineers (like myself), lawyers, medical professionals and don't even read the news, have no interest in politics. It's a form of parochialism. The attitude is "so long as I'm doing fine, why do I need to pay attention". I find it very depressing.
Honestly, while I 100% agree that the electoral college and gerrymandering are trash, I feel people do use them as mechanism to avoid dealing with the fact that someone like Trump is just genuinely really popular. Next Tuesday he has a decent shot of being the choice of more than 50% of voting Americans. Ultimately any fair system would still give him the presidency in this case.
but e.g. Australia has a great voting system (on all levels from the voting rules to the election day administration), yet they still seem to have fairly screwed up partisan politics.
i think it might improve things but wouldn't help make politics fundamentally better.