It’s been said before, what a year! We’ve followed the presidential election, electoral reform, and everything in between.

Below, we've compiled the top articles on IVN from this past year - found using Facebook engagement and article pageviews. Check out the headlines and highlights of each article.

Out of all the winners of the 2016 elections, the biggest might have been the Libertarian Party (LP). While Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson did not reach the coveted 5% in national polls to boost his party in future presidential elections, he did help his party extend its ballot access to 39 states for the 2018 elections.

A free press is the watchdog of the people. The media holds the sacred responsibility of alerting the citizenry of actions by governments, elected politicians, corporations and even private citizens. It is the fourth estate guaranteed by the First Amendment. For democracy, this is the fire alarm.

But now the fourth estate is in crisis. The news media has been reshaped, redefined, and side tracked by commercial interests, biased ownership, the phenomenon of social media, the Internet, and a failure to police itself. As a result, fake news has become a threat to democracy.

On Monday, December 19, electors from across the country gathered to cast the official votes for president. Of the 538 votes that were tallied, seven came from faithless electors – electors who chose not to vote for the nominee who won a plurality of votes in their state. These included four Democratic electors in Washington state, two Republican electors in Texas, and one Democratic elector in Hawaii.

Over a month after the conclusion of the 2016 presidential election, politicians, and unnamed sources quoted in various media outlets continue to raise the spectre of Russian interference in the elections.

As TIME pointed out last week, this is a fear that goes back to the time of America's Founding Fathers, with Alexander Hamilton, for instance, concerned about, "the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils."

"Therefore, putting away falsehood, let everyone speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another." - Ephesians 4:25, RSV

In 1949, I was in the eighth grade at Roosevelt Junior High School in San Diego, watching with my classmates, for teaching purposes, a black and white film depicting an automobile crash.

At the end of the film, Mr. Grant, our teacher, asked the class to tell him what we saw, but despite having seen the same film, we saw different things.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, or CPD, has been under fire for its policies for several years now. For the past 24 years, the CPD has excluded anyone but the Republican and Democratic nominees from participating in the three presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate in September and October before the election.

In the wake of a undergraduate shortage in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), degrees in the liberal arts and humanities have come under fire, often deemed frivolous and unsuitable for a competitive and technologically inclined U.S. job market.

I know what you are thinking. How could the democratic process have possibly won in 2016? If anything, the 2016 elections showed just how much control two private political corporations -- the Republican and Democratic Parties -- have over elections. And you are right. It did.

However, 2016 proved something else: Voters, fed up with the status quo, can make a difference.

This week on IVN's podcast we discuss how the president-elects use of twitter and how it could impact businesses with Dr. Wendy Patrick. We also chat with Katy Grimes, journalist with FlashReport.org on how California readies for battle against the new administration in Washington D.C.