I would argue that the main benefit of democracy is not electing "the right people" by a free and fair election, but by having a mechanism to remove bad leaders without violence. So a propaganda machine influencing elections is not ideal, but if it results in bad leaders, then that will become obvious to people at some point and they will vote them out. Elections will always have some random factors. Not everyone is going to vote. There will be fads. So election isn't the important part, UN-election is.
I mean, technically, the US does it every four years. At least, it used to. But that was just a blip in the historical record. We'll see what happens in four years from now to see which way the trend moves. Here's hoping it was truly a blip and not the start of a trend
