Equality by lot

In a short article called “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” published on January 3, 1919, Vladimir Lenin asserts that

[As long as] the bourgeoisie continue to keep the entire apparatus of state power in their hands, [and] a handful of exploiters continue to use the […] state machine[, e]lections held in such circumstances are lauded by the bourgeoisie […] as being “free”, “equal”, “democratic” and “universal”. These words are designed to conceal the truth, to conceal the fact that the means of production and political power remain in the hands of the exploiters, and that therefore real freedom and real equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population, are out of the question.

It seems that for Lenin “the means of political power that remain in the hands exploiters” which render elections undemocratic are primarily the channels of mass communication:

In practice the capitalists, the exploiters, the landowners and the profiteers own 9/10 of the best meeting halls, and 9/10 of the stocks of newsprint, printing presses, etc.. The urban workers and the farm hands and day laborers are, in practice, debarred from democracy by the “sacred right of property” (guarded by the Kautskys and Renners, and now, to our regret, by Friedrich Adler as well) and by the bourgeois state apparatus, that is, bourgeois officials, bourgeois judges, and so on. The present “freedom of assembly and the press” in the “democratic” (bourgeois democratic) German republic is false and hypocritical, because in fact it is freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with venomous lies of the bourgeois press

Thus, it is by manipulating the voters through what would today be called “misinformation” or “disinformation” (or what a few years ago was called “fake news”), that the elites manage to get majorities to vote against their own interests and maintain the situation in which they are controled by the elites. And in general, any electoralist system (whether in a capitalist system, or in a nascent socialist system, which he calls a “dictatorship of the proletariat”) is a system of oppression because the dominant class uses its control of the communication channels to get the voters to support it electorally. Therefore, the dominant class cannot be changed electorally but only by overthrowing the electoral system in one way or another.
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