I think you put words in my mouth and strawmanned it to an extreme degree and then argued with the strawman. A black and white view isn't helpful nor is it one I ascribe to. I think there are objective qualitative criteria of democratic values (which themselves aren't unidemensional and may be in opposition of each other at times). Can you actually numerically ascribe a single democratic value that can be used to objectively compare countries? I think that part is mostly silly. Not sure why you're grouping my views with Freedom House as it's not a thing I brought up. I might agree with them on some things and disagree on others. I don't have that much knowledge about them.

I think statistics can be certainly be used to be illustrative. For example, having a 7x higher incarceration rate than Canada might imply that on some level USA has a larger problem than Canada on this democracy level. Specifically, the US disenfranchises people while in prison and frequently keeps them disenfranchised afterward. I'd say it's pretty non-controversial to say that metrics around the percentage of the population living within the country that is enfranchised is a measure of one aspect of democracy (which means that most countries fail on this metric of letting non-citizens vote). Another might be whether citizens believe that an election result was free and fair (in addition to actually trying to find any evidence that it wasn't). A more democratic country would probably engender more good will and faith from its constituents vs one where the population believe that it only paid lip service to the idea.

Anyway, that's all I'll say on this as I'm done talking with someone engaging in bad faith tactics.