The Marxist view is that capitalist countries are anti-democratic because the bourgeois class has the power to both sway elections and exert influence over people's lives outside of the political sphere. True democracy means a state that actually represents the people's interests, which in turn requires suppressing the political influence wielded by the rich.

The liberal view is that the state's capacity for repression is uniquely dangerous, and so freedom just means being able to act without interference from the state (not from private entities), and what determines whether a state is free or not is whether it adheres to certain principles. In that view, a Marxist state that represses the bourgeoisie is violating the principle against political repression, and is therefore not democratic.

On the other hand, Marxists point to things like capitalist states repressing strikes to show that in those countries, the state is also willing to act on behalf of the people who control it, and that that this whole idea of a state being constrained by "principles" or "norms" and somehow being independent of class conflict is nonsense and just not how politics works. This is because Marxists view ideas as being the products of material conditions and material interests, and so any such "norms" or "principles" are only as strong as whatever class interests are invested in upholding them.

In the West we’ve been getting 50/50 splits on voting

Close elections are a fairly meaningless metric, especially when all candidates agree on certain key issues.

whereas out east

"Out east?" Where? There's tons of different countries with all kinds of different governments in what's classically considered the East. There isn't even a Comintern to generalize about, but it doesn't seem to slow you down at all.

Have you actually studied the government structure of, say, Laos? I doubt it. So, where did you get this information you're confidently repeating about it? Mind-boggling how liberals will just say shit. Lazy stereotyping at best.

Elections≠Democracy. Again, you are expecting liberal west (or hegemonic) "democracy". I am not making a moral judgement of either, just trying to explain that the definition of democracy that has been shoved to the people's brain of the global north (hegemony) is not the only or the correct one.