"Just for show" would be foregone conclusion elections like Russia's or ignored elections like Venezuela's. Voters must still be central to the system and get the final say for it to be democratic.
The system just needs to be wiser and more resilient. For instance, the Electoral College was originally intended to be more than a bunch of sworn minions. In Europe, many parliamentary democracies have strong party infrastructures that prevent their takeover by "memetic" forces. There are endless possible improvements.
I think the state of democracy in the "factory bamboozling" era is such that we need a system that reflects direct voter preferences less, not more.
The trick is coming up with a system that diverges towards the interest of the masses, rather than the elites or the corrupt or the foreign. Basically, the system must get the voters' preferences wrong, but get them wrong right.
This is really akin to the nature of representative democracy. Elected leaders manage the voters' interest rather than always doing what is polling better on that day. It's obviously a tricky task, but it's the hallmark of the best-functioning democracies.
Right now we're about as far from the goal as we've ever been. Our systems have been hacked and we don't have an effective counter.
+1, ^5, ditto and Amen for CodeWarrior and its inline asm. CW was way ahead of its time in terms of UX. Its C++ compiler was well above average too, particularly in terms of codegen (although all C++ compilers were effectively broken in that era.)
The only thing that held it back was the lack of scripting. It was probably a rebound rejection of the MPW days, when everything was script-based (and with a crazy custom language.) I remember thinking that the design team probably didn't want to open that Pandora's box, lest scripting might lazily become required and spoil the UX.
Unfortunately, this made CW unsuited to the advent of CI. Even then, I still think it was stupid for Apple not to acquire Metrowerks. The first 5-10 years of Xcode versions had a worse UX and way worse codegen.
It's not impossible, but of course they're not homegrown.
Putin's apologists always demand he be given the benefit of the doubt. That's akin to convicting a spy beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard is meant to favor false negatives over false positives when incarcerating people. Better to let a thousand criminals go free than to imprison an innocent person.
If we used that for spies, we'd have 1000 of them running around for each convicted one. Not to mention that they have a million ways to avoid detection. They rely on their training, on the resources of the state, and on infiltrators who sabotage detection efforts. The actual ratio would be much higher.
In the case of opinion manipulation, the balance is even more pernicious. That's because the West decided a couple decades ago to use the "it's just a flesh wound" approach to foreign interference.
The problem is that we're not just protecting gullible voters. We're also defending the reputation of democracy. Either democracy works, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we're philosophically no better than Russia and China.
But if it was possible to control the outcome of elections by online manipulation alone, that would imply that democracy doesn't really work. Therefore online manipulation "can't work." Officially, it might sway opinion by a few points, but a majority of voters must definitionally be right. If manipulation makes little difference, then there's not much reason to fight it (or too openly anyways.)
Paradoxically, when it comes to detecting Russian voter manipulation, the West and Putin are strange bedfellows. Nothing to see here, move along.
The system just needs to be wiser and more resilient. For instance, the Electoral College was originally intended to be more than a bunch of sworn minions. In Europe, many parliamentary democracies have strong party infrastructures that prevent their takeover by "memetic" forces. There are endless possible improvements.