How can our election be real if our votes aren't real.
Most aren't, at least looking at the house of representatives. Going by the counts for the 2016 congressional elections, 30.1% of votes were wasted on doomed candidates (not including third parties) and 35.8% were wasted as surplus. The votes wasted on third parties were another 4.3%, for around 70.2% total. In other words, 29.8% of the votes nationally decided the outcome, and the other 91 million votes may as well have been sent as emergency relief to victims of hurricanes as toilet paper. Put a third way, 12% of the total population decided what the house would look like.
Interestingly, 61 of the sitting congressmen weren't even elected (they ran unopposed, the only names on the ballot; literally any schmuck who could win a primary could get in). I particularly admire the 264,414 upright Vermonters who dutifully voted for their one option for their state's only representative. Considering the $174,000 salary, that sounds like a pretty sweet racket.
While voting is one of the least effective things you can do, obviously it isn't pointless; by voting, you likely exist as a small part of a data point inside the databases strategists use when deciding how to most efficiently waste their constituents votes with gerrymandering and whether or not to waste any of their team's owners' money on a campaign.
Unless you're one of the ones lucky enough to be drowning in super-PAC ads right now, anyway.