Have We Lost democracy?

I have not been in touch with local Herndon politics for a long time. But I was always told that local elections are non-partisan.  This means candidates do not run as an (R) or (D).  I assumed it also meant that those running for office were not allowed to accept funds from the Republican or Democratic Parties.  And yet, I have recently read in an editorial in the Times that Lisa Merkel, who is running for major again, has accepted funds from the Democratic Party. And she has spread these funds to a group of candidates that seem to be running as a pack. By pack, I mean that I have received mailers from Lisa Merkel that has listed Olem, Wolf, Boll, Nagel Davidson and Bake with the Mayor.  This is very partisan to me and from what I know is not legal. I am not a lawyer, but it seems we are seeing more and more politicians doing things anyway they want, even though they seem to be not democratic or at least in line with democratic principles. And I wonder why no one ever does any thing to question these activities and then act to stop these kinds activities if in fact they are illegal. I see this in not just our town elections but at the county, state and national levels.  Now that there more left-leaning folks are in office dense development is the "new and best" ways to go. And I note that there are possibly higher taxes coming around the corner in the town and the county.  If the economy were not so bad I would expect to see higher taxes at the Federal level. I wonder if the state is next in higher taxes, although one can see fees rise and this is a tax increase in a sense. We almost saw a rise in the retail tax go up during the Great Recession. Even our new Governor is trying to find a way around the funding for Obama care at the state level. By avoiding the democratic way of having such a huge decision be made by the representatives at the state level I see governing by force than by democratic processes.   It is feeling more like we have semi-dictators instead of Presidents & Governors these days.  And now this new breed of politics is coming to my home town.
I hope the people will  wake up and vote to change the country back to a true democratic form of government.  I fear we are all running around taking care of our own responsibilities, families and children (fighting traffic 20% of our waking hours) and have little time to attend to civic responsibilities.  I feel for the middle class that works so hard and provides the vast majority of taxes for our country - I am one of them. And I love to hate the tolls we are all being forced to pay for roads that are free of the rest of Virginians.  (Never saw a democratic process for this huge financial burden we in Western Fairfax County are forced to pay.)
 But I hope that others may be like me and realize we all need to wake up or we will wake up to a new way of running our country - if we have not changed over already.
Paul Olson 
Herndon, VA