In America, you can only vote in primaries (that is, choose presidential and other candidates) if you are a registered voter of that party -- which means that it's also restricted to a subset of the public.
So I'm not sure I agree it is a mismatch to most democracies. Obviously there is a difference, but it's still clearly democratic in spirit (and actually matches how some real democracies work in some aspects).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primaries_in_the_United...
I'm not particularly interested in arguing about what democracy "is" (we'll be here all day, and then some), but I think it's clear that this model is what democracy "isn't". And I'm not saying that's a bad thing (certainly different styles of governance are suitable for different contexts).
Obviously users will be impacted, but in such a tangential way that I would argue that it'd be more like how other countries are impacted by the decisions of a democratic country's leadership (and you wouldn't argue that Canadians should have the right to vote in American presidential elections). Just like the Linux CoC, I don't understand why people who don't contribute to the project should be involved in how the project's development is run.
