How did you manage that?
You appoint the
head of the electoral commission for five years, renewable for further five year terms. They do not serve at the pleasure of the government of the day.
The other things like how to when and how draw electoral boundaries etc are written in the legislation so there's not a lot of room for the AEC to fuck around with them. There are obviously other aspects, but
this talks about how electoral boundaries are drawn.
Two other aspects are relevant. The first is compulsory voting, and the other is preferential voting.
With
voluntary voting, you have to motivate people to get out and vote. You can do this by inspiring them or by making them angry.
It's a lot, lot easier to make them angry. This encourages polarisation of the political process, and this flows down the hill to all the many and various appointments of judges and EPA officials and all the rest which any normal government makes. With compulsory voting, people just have to vote, the only question is for who. Some parties still try to make people angry but they tend to be minority parties (ie never forming part of a government), and stay minority unless they change to behaving like a major party, which get people to vote for them by promising them benefits. So there's not such a motivation to politicise institutions.
As for preferential voting, essentially it works as, you get a ballot paper, and number the candidates 1,2,3, etc in your order of preference. First the AEC looks at all the "1" votes. If someone gets more than 50%, they're in. If not - whoever got the least votes, they take their ballot papers and look at who they put 2nd, and allocate those votes to them.
For example, Kyle, Pat and Pundit are candidates, and we have 100 voters. The primary (put "1") vote goes as follows,
Kyle 45
Pat 40
Pundit 15
Pundit is eliminated, and they look at Pundit's voters and see who they put 2nd. Of the 15 Pundit voters, 3 put Kyle 2nd, and 12 and put Pat 2nd. Now it goes,
Kyle 45+3 = 48
Pat 40+12 = 52
and Pat is elected. Of course it becomes more complicated with 10 or whatever candidates, but you get the picture.
The result of this is that groups who get just a few percent of the vote and would never themselves get in do have some influence. Parties can recommend to their followers who they should preference. So Pundit could tell his followers, "actually, put Kyle 2nd." They may or may not listen, but many do - and then Kyle gets 6 of the 2nd preference votes instead of 3, and gets in.
In this way, a party like the Greens who themselves almost never win seats can influence policy. The major party comes along and says, "If we subsidise wind turbines, will you tell your voters to put us 2nd?" and the other says, "If we let in more refugees, will you...?" And so the major parties start taking on some of the policies of minor parties. This, too, makes things less polarised, and reduces the tendency to politicising institutions.
Of course it's not foolproof. Here in Victoria the police have become politicised because the same guys have been in for 17 of the last 20 years, so all the senior police were appointed by those guys. Thus BLM, climate, etc protests being allowed but anti-government ones broken up. So we can say that an independent electoral commission, compulsory and preferential voting certainly help, but they are not everything in preventing the politicisation of institutions.
On the other hand, nobody doubts the legitimacy of our elections. The elections are free and fair and essentially without fraud or manipulation - even if the government of the day is corrupt as all fuck, people definitely
chose that corrupt government.