Systemic flaw.

The biggest problem with voting is that people generally go to the polls for one of two reasons: Either to tell other people what to do, or to take their stuff.

The kind of people you'd actually want as neighbors, the kind that aren't a pack of thieving busybodies, either trudge to the ballot box because some half-remembered high school civics teacher told them they were supposed to, or vote by defensive reflex in the hopes that, say, Darth Vader will be a more benign overlord than Cthulhu, or just give the whole thing up as a bad idea and do something productive on election day, like cleaning the gutters.

You can rail against pork until the... er, pigs come home, but the flaw is built into the system. The people most likely to vote in the first place are the ones most easily bribed. You can complain all you want about the ever-burgeoning number of laws but, frankly, if you keep electing lawmakers, guess what's gonna keep getting made?

This is the part of the post where I am, by internet tradition, supposed to offer my brilliant and incredibly simplistic solution to the problem, but you know what? I'm stumped.