Social media and democracy: Can we learn from machine learning?

Voting and electing are, from a machine learning perspective, classification problems: The „algorithm" in our brain has to choose one from several available options as the correct one. The options are candidates in the case of elections or „YES/NO" in the case of voting (like in the direct democracy in Switzerland). In a democracy, there is not a single „classifier" (King) making the decisions but a large number of people. What is the benefit of this method? Why is democracy historically so successful? We might say that democracies are more stable because everybody is allowed to participate in the decision process and the result will represent the wishes of everybody. But there are many cases in history where the majority in a democratic country suppressed a minority. I personally don't believe in this theory. I rather think that in a democracy, the decisions tend to be much smarter than what can be achieved by a single king or a small group of leaders. It is the collective intelligence formed by the whole voting population which makes democracy superior to other systems of government. The method is also well known in machine learning under the term „ensemble methods".