Means

You may think my declaration yesterday not timely, but there is some other consideration that may skip your eyes:

General election (or a democratic system) is the means, not the aim.

What I mean is we should aim for a society with no corruption, no secret agreement between billionaires and senior government officials, the opinion of the majority is followed while that of the others is listened to and respected, or any other desirable character that you could name. (Alas, the ultimate aim of us should be leading a happy and peaceful life. That's something we often forget.)

And, general election or some other democratic system is associated with these desirable characters.

Let me use the standard of medical research. The two things are associated, but a casual relationship could not be established, and the correlation coefficient is often rather weak.

Even if the relation is a causal one, to use the jargon of logic, we could be sure that general election is not a sufficient condition for no corruption and so forth. (Yes, democracy may be a necessary condition - on the prerequisite that the relationship is causal; I belief general election - as a specific form of democracy - would be exceedingly unlikely to be a necessary condition.)

I shouldn't say any more to spoil your appetite.