All current and historical AES states have had electoral systems that differs significantly from the systems known from bourgeois parliamentary systems. Candidates are selected either by the vanguard party or by a unity front dominated by the vanguard party. Voters can then view either for our against the one list of candidates.
To my my knowledge there are virtually no historical examples of voters rejecting the list and there are reports (in Western sources, so they should be taken with a grain of salt) of significant social pressure being levied on voters to vote yes for the list.
You don’t get the election night dramas known from bourgeois systems where there can be genuine uncertainty as to whether ghoul A or ghoul B gets elected. In bourgeois states the function of elections seems to be to legitimise the system by giving voters a relatively free choice between a selection of candidates within the accepted spectrum of (liberal-conservative) opinion. In AES states, at the time of the election voters doesn’t seem to have much influence and their participation seems to be ceremonial in nature.
This begs the question what the function of these elections are. The lazy liberal explanation is that the evil commies are hiding sham elections that they think people are too stupid to see through. However, AES states has been around for more than a century and almost all of them uses some version of this system so they clearly must have some function in legitimising the state and mobilising popular support.
I would love if someone with knowledge in the subject could elaborate on this.
I really like citizen juries as a mechanism for policymaking. They don’t work properly in modern liberal democracies for practical/political reasons, but the concept is something that could be implemented well as a way of getting around the problems of representative democracy (and also of direct democracy). You get the benefits of sortition, like proper citizen representation and limiting the power of career politicians, but without the risk that you accidentally appoint someone unfit to a position.
You’d still need people with specialized skills and experience to implement policy, but they’d have less latitude and fewer opportunities to act against the interests of the public if their job was narrowed down to acting on mandates given to them by citizens.