The complaints about cheating are not connected to the electronic voting machines. They are connected to the mail-in ballots. People on social media are talking about tracking their ballots that they either mailed in or put in drop boxes and finding out their ballot was marked provisional, when it wasn't. Or it was rejected. Or it never made it to the polling places. Or they are missing. It's happening mainly in swing states. Then there is Musk's app to consider which targeted voters in swing states and collected personal information from them instead of letting them register to vote like it was supposed to. cnbc.com/2024/08/02/elo… I think he might have gotten into trouble for this, but I'm not sure. Personally, I also find it odd that swing states are saying they had record-breaking turnout on early voting that even surpassed day of voting records, but then the day after the election, reports started saying voter turnout was low and that Harris received far fewer votes than Biden and Trump received the same amount of votes.

As far as what we need? We need unbiased, fact-checked, and trusted news sites without paywalls that are easily acceptable and not just reliant on social media (at least not current popular social media). If people can't afford rent and food, they also can't afford to buy their news. News is a public service, or at least it should be, but right now, too much news is owned by corporations, so there are paywalls. I appreciate being able to access your information without having to pay. But my point is that without access to news sources that are trusted by the general public, where a large number of people can only access sensationalized headlines, they are forced to go to independent sources, or fringe media that isn't always as reliable.

This leads me to think we need a trustworthy social media site. We need a place where we can have conversations and easy access to fact-checking mechanisms, where we aren't being tracked, and our data isn't being sold. Between Zuckerburg and Musk, our data is being used against us to sway our opinions and influence our behavior, including how we vote, because our algorithms are designed for the CEOs to make money from us vs. being a place to socialize and organize online. They are both destroying how we interact with the world, creating and proliferating mistrust in the people we know and don't know and our institutions. Many of us stay, though, because we think it's the only free place to communicate. We want to share our stories and learn about other people from a distance that seems safe, but even that is deceptive.

If they didn't win by what would traditionally be thought of as cheating, then they won using propaganda, which is not a new idea. We aren't supposed to be able to pay people to vote, yet Musk got to give away millions to voters to get them to register, and he got them to gamble to incentivize them to vote; how is that legal? We don't need to be like them. We need to do better, and we need to be better. I think we could create a social media site that works on donations instead of selling user data that would be a great start.