No; that would make us a direct democracy,

Okay, the simplest web page I was able to find to explain this was from an Australian site. I feel like the Kahn Academy site is perhaps a bit loaded, in that it classifies "representative democracy" as an "elite democracy", which it technically is, but it makes it sound bad, and the Wikipedia page gets bogged down in the weeds with a lot of stuff that isn't relevant to what we are saying, but feel free to check those out, too - but here's a simple page to summarize:
https://www.moadoph.gov.au/democracy/defining-democracy/