Judge appointments work in a similar way, I assume other offices do as well. Judges often decide precisely when they are going to retire in order to manipulate how their replacement is chosen, by vote or by appointment. These positions SHOULD be mostly non-political and merit based in general. In reality, just like economics, politics is inevitably everywhere. The real solution here is to get out the vote for every election at every level, not just the big federal one every 4 years.
That's the way voting in a Republic, where you're not voting directly for every position, law, and amendment, should work. The Republic falls apart and corruption and manipulation of the public will becomes easier when people don't turn out to vote at the smaller election cycles. The death of local news plays into this too as it becomes much more difficult to stay informed about the people and politics of those smaller local elections. If you think our representative system is broken and needs to change, the solution is the same, get out and vote for every election and support local investigative journalism.
I (and my entire class for a semester) have a remarkably similar story for one of our classes under a particular teacher. Turns out, they couldn't be bothered to actually grade any of the papers, so they gave out zeros expecting kids to come in and correct them later. The worst part was that this was a teacher that many of us kids had liked and respected beforehand. We did all learn a very important lesson about CYA, trust but verify, and personal backups that year.