Mathemarically, a slim victory with a large percent of the population abstaining does not indicate “majority desire”.
Democrasy doesn’t measure majority desire, it measures electioneering. Majority desire is definitely an aspect of elections, but it’s not the thing that gets measured.
There are better ways to accurately measure majority desire, and they are not one person/one vote systems.
What the system purports to give us is not accuracy, but fairness. It’s acknowledged that no matter what system you put in place, its ideals will be perverted. The best we hope for is that multiple parties all have access to those same perversions. So the difference between the U.S. and Russia is that both Bush and Gore had a right to sue the state of Florida. Of course the outcome doesn’t represent the will of the people in any meaningful way, but we take comfort in knowing that both candidates had the same games open to them.
In Russia, Putin is playing a wholly different legal game than everyone else. That’s anti-liberal, and anti-democratic.
Much hand wringing is happening in the U.S. today because the American President is mostly above the legal system, as its executor, with only the Senate holding him in check. And it’s not clear our current Senate is committed to the rule of law. We will see when Mueller’s report comes out. And perhaps some governors can also hold him to account.
Again, none of this bears any direct relation to the “will of the people” except that there is a method to the madness and any citizen can volunteer for any aspect of the game.