An average US citizen’s vote is muddled through several undemocratic layers both institutional and bourgeoisie interests. Its kind of like a funhouse mirror where some votes are counted as greater than other votes, some votes look smaller than they really are, others just are at the wrong angle to be viewed so they are just not counted. It’s kind of why most people don’t bother.

The first primary is with the Bourgeoisie to select which candidates get funding to prevent a candidate from representing proletarian interests from getting attention. Next is the Democratic/Republican primary that one can vote for, but each committee can choose to change the results and that vote is more of a suggestion to the delegates that actually vote. The democratic/republican committee of each state makes its own rules. It could be winner of the state takes all, could be elected district by district, could be decided unilaterally independent of the popular vote in states like Oregon. There is also a spectacle effect of the early voting states that are televised, that make some candidates look more viable than others if they do well in the early voting states.

Next is the final election, which is your vote to decide what to suggest what your electoral college will vote for in your state. Often this is decided by how you vote in your gerrymandered district. Gerrymandered districts exist to make sure that the state government can decide which votes matter by geographically running the district through groups of people the current government would rather not influence the votes in their state. Once again each state can also make up its own rules on how the electors from the electoral college are assigned, sometimes it is winner take all, sometimes it is each electoral district decides how the voter votes. Also techically the elector in the electoral college can choose to be a faithless elector and vote for whoever they feel like without legal repercussions. Also the voter to elector ratio varies state by state.

This process is so complicated most normal people won’t follow this. You can vote on local issues a bit more meaningfully. Just be glad that once this country dies the insane procedures can be abolished for hopefully less maddening procedures of elections.