I know exactly how you feel. As a young voter, you’ve felt disenfranchised from politics for as long as you can remember -- there was too much scandal, too much mudslinging, too little attention given to the issues that you really cared about. And then Bernie came along, and he was everything you wanted in a candidate. He was honest. He had a track record of commitment to the issues that mattered to you. He cared. And for the first time in your life, you cared about which candidate won the nomination. So, you campaigned endlessly for him. You bought t-shirts and buttons; you shared his stances on social media; maybe you even caucused. You followed his progress along the campaign trail, and you were as heartbroken as I was when he didn’t receive the Democratic Party nomination.

As much as I loved Bernie, though, and as much as I loved his policies, I will not be writing his name in on the election ballot. I’ve seen so many people on Facebook and other social media say that they’ll be doing this very thing, but what they fail to recognize is that write-ins have never been an effective means of electing a candidate. Since Bernie was unable to secure the Democratic nomination, there’s absolutely no way that an uprising of millennial voters (who are in the minority of voters, I should add) will be able to sway the election in Bernie’s favor. The most that they will likely succeed in doing is splitting the Democratic vote significantly enough to guarantee that Donald Trump, a man with zero political experience and zero real hair, will be our next president.

Now, I know some of you are thinking, “But third-party candidates are always an option! Why not vote for Dr. Jill Stein?” and while I acknowledge that candidates such as Dr. Stein might seem to be more attractive options than Hillary Rodham Clinton, I also am able to acknowledge that Dr. Stein's chances of winning are non-existent. Since the majority of the Democratic Party (especially the older generation) will be voting for Hillary, voting for a third-party candidate will only split the vote further on the Democratic side. If you know anything about politics, you know that third-party candidates have never been a viable option. If you vote third-party (or refuse to vote at all as a means of “sticking it to the man”), you will be complicit in handing over the presidency to the Republican presidential candidate and ushering in the apocalypse.

So, I get it. Maybe you’re still hung up on the email scandal. Maybe you think that Hillary has made some questionable choices in the past. Maybe you question her “flip-flopping” on key platform issues. But it’s important to recognize that people change and grow – and Hillary is no exception to this – and to recognize what your alternative is. Donald Trump wants to literally build a wall between us and another country. He mocks the disabled. He is a fear-monger preying on racism and terror in order to create a country driven by panic. And on top of all of this, he has no political experience. Is this really the type of person that you want to give control of nuclear weapons too?

In this upcoming presidential election, I will absolutely be voting for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Since my alternative is a disgusting, racist, ableist Dorito of a man (who is endorsed by the KKK), this seems like a no-brainer to me.

This is the first time that many of us will have the opportunity to influence the outcome of an election. Make it historic for all of the right reasons.