I’m not joking. Here’s what I think:

The whole game is rigged, it’s like a casino, the house always wins.

It’s never a complete wash, always a close photo finish. This is statistically way too unlikely to not be rigged. The tools you mentioned, those are the tools to rig the elections to 49/51 so the news media corpos get big clicks & big cash. Everyone who participates is more likely to be hooked, that’s even more clicks.

If I were a news media company boss, I’d pay the electoral theater big bills to make it look close, that’s guaranteed ROI. And not only that, it makes the state look more “democratic” than when there’s an 80/20.

The votes that count are those of the big bourgeois. I assume they first decide who will win the 51/49, then they gerrymander it accordingly, and when the votes are still “wrong”, they’ll use other methods.

So your vote will never change the outcome, but it will always make the news corpos make more bank.