Is democracy a too dangerous form of government to entrust to the People

[sarisataka]

without making allowances for corrective action when the People make the wrong choice?

There are an amazing number of proposals of non-democratic action, from immediately jailing Trump and his associates, to Biden refusing to relinquish power, to a military coup.

What sort of "guardrails" can be installed to "repair" an election when democracy fails to elect an obviously better candidate?

[Elessar Zappa]

1. There's no way to stop that without dismantling democracy.

The people voted in a fascist. That’s it and we’re going to have to live with it. A law that “corrects” bad elections would be anti-democratic and abused.

[Hekate]

2. The Founders mistrusted direct democracy, fearing the mob. They did various things to mitigate...

…this, which others can speak to better than I. But we are structured as a democratic republic, not a direct democracy.

But here’s the thing: our ability to rectify our mistakes comes every 2, 4, and 6 years when we hold elections.

[BlueTsunami2018]

3. That's what the electoral college is supposed to be for.

To protect the country from demagogues and tyrants according to Hamilton.

That if The People vote in a person of unsavory character, the College is supposed to check that move.

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.

[Scubamatt]

4. Believe it or not

but PART of the reason for the Electoral College was to act as such a guardrail. Before the rise of parties - when electors sign oaths to vote in a certain way - the idea was that if a demagogue won the election, the electors - who were all men (note first problem) of means/standing and presumably statesmen - would choose someone else. When the TFG "won" the first election, Republican electors were flooded with messages asking them to do the right thing for the country. But, being Republicans, they of course did not.

[ForgedCrank]

5. We have

such a system, sort of.
You will often hear Republicans yelling about how we are not a Democracy, but rather a Republic.
In the simplest terms that even I can understand, we do not have "a" Democracy, we have hundreds of small ones. We have state, county, city, even township level Democratic elections. Some of those will operate as a collective for national elections, the thing we call the EC.
So while I still consider that to be Democracy by it's nature and design, many will argue it is not a Democracy because it is not a true Democracy by definition. I find this to be just hair-splitting. The end result with the EC is that we DO have that protection built-in. The guys who designed this were some incredibly smart people, and I'm still in awe that they were able to predict as many issues as they did. Most of it was based on governmental failures that they had witnessed or were otherwise documented, and they considered it all.
In my personal opinion, the current noise is mostly about misunderstood political freak-out gossip. The guardrails that everyone is claiming do not exist, absolutely do exist. That is The Constitution. For example, in the center of all of the 2020 noise and chaos in certification and inauguration month, in the end, did you notice that Trump did leave when he was required to? He acted like a spoiled child, but he left and things moved forward as designed.
There are two other branches that can and will be used to keep these people in line. It's not always going to go the way we want, and in the time frame we want, but the system will correct itself by those leveraging the tools afforded to them. So while we consider the result of this election to be flawed, 52-53%(?) of the country does not. That is not a failure of the system, it is the will of the voters regardless of how much we (the other 48%) may disagree. It just sucks.
Having said that, the system has another built-in mechanism for when people DO make poor choices, and that is the revolving nature of our leadership. Everyone gets to re-evaluate and vote again in 4 years, and we will.

[Tweedy]

6. Time (& a more stable fourth estate)

Our ancestors had to suffer through the presidency of James Buchanan.

In November 1947, Winston Churchill said

“‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.

Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

Churchill was right.

Ask the Hungarians how 22% inflation, destroyed universities and fear are working out for them.

Mr. Trump is going to try to diminish our country for his own benefit. That starts by destroying democracy. Let us stop him when we can, where we can and time will do the rest.

Common sense will prevail again.

I think? Mark Twain said “you can fool some people all of the time and all people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

Mr. Trump’s win is based in lies and fabrications. This country will figure it out.

First, we must do what we can to minimize the damage for two years.

How we repair the press I do not know.

[jls4561]

7. Well, if you are going to call Magats and Trump flunkies people.