There's a host of reasons why the dysfunction goes all the way down to the low efficacy of voting, but HN is notoriously unable to handle these kinds of discussions without several 500-post demon threads.

For example, people tend to get stuck in tribal thinking where one party or the other is to blame when the seeds of the problems go all the way back to the founding of the country. It's hard to shake people out of it so they can have a productive discussion even when everyone's trying to be fair and honest.

In their defense, last vote was on a working day and not all employers let their employees skip work to vote.

It's weird that voting does not take place on a non-working day in the US (like Sunday, for example).

Does the US not have some kind of law that guarantees employees the opportunity to take at least a few hours off work for voting?

No.

Some employers tried making it look fancy to let employees take the day off to go voting so that maybe some other employers would pick up the habit in exchange of some bragging rights but it didn't go very far.