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Roman elections were a lot more complicated than that, but you are right: ultimately only the nobility had any say in how things were actually done. However, they had a stopgap that said that if the nobility can't come to a consensus the plebians would get a say, and since no nobility would ever let that happen, they got their stuff together quick.

The plebians did have a congress of sort, what I think the Founding Fathers wanted the House of Representatives to be. That body had almost no power and could only whine and complain when things got bad.

The English figured out you bring the peasant leaders in and have them figure out how to tax themselves. It makes things a lot less messy. Things got out of hand, though, when the peasants (really, the new middle class) decided that kings aren't allowed to do certain things rather than levy taxes like they were told.