To the people who wrote in Harambe for the 2016 election

Voting is a wonderful gift citizens of the United States of America are granted. We are gifted with the awesome responsibility to choose the leader of our country. During every election, people often like to discuss the importance of voting. Rarely a day will go by leading up to an election that you won’t hear something along the lines of casting your ballot and having your voice heard being the most important thing you can do.

After all, people fought and died for that right, you shouldn’t take this responsibility lightly.

However, this election, several reports have come in of people writing in Harambe, the gorilla whose controversial death became a media frenzy and cultural phenomenon over the summer, as their vote for the President of the United States. This is beyond appalling.

Presumably, you not only threw away your vote, but wasted it on a joke. You decided to prove that, not only were you unconcerned about the level of responsibility attached to the right to vote for the person running our country, but also effectively wiped your ass with said vote.

Another issue harped on a lot this election is that of voting for a third party candidate. Several people view this as a wasted vote, arguing that because it is highly unlikely for these candidates to win the presidency, it defaults as a vote for the candidate you were trying to keep out of office (whether it be Trump or Hillary). They claim that since you did not vote for the most likely person to defeat the undesirable candidate, you did nothing to keep them out and effectively allowed them to win the election.

However, as part of this responsibility citizens are given, we are called to inform ourselves and vote for the candidate who adheres closest with our own views. If a third party candidate is who adheres closest to said citizen’s views, then it would be logically wrong for them to vote for anyone else. However, I highly doubt when you really sat down to think about it that Harambe was the candidate that came to mind. Faulting those that voted for the candidate they believed would be the best leader of our country should not be our ultimate goal, but for the rest of you “jokesters”… come on.

Those who wrote in a deceased animal as their vote for President of the United States in the 2016 election are directly responsible for the outcome of the election. The price of your joke was the future of our country. Rather than using this incredible responsibility to choose the candidate you felt would be the best to lead this country, you made a dumb joke that, frankly, wasn’t funny.

Those of you who made this decision, let it rest in the back of your mind and on your conscious throughout the next four years. At the conclusion of Trump’s presidency, I would like to know if you still find it funny that you wasted your vote that could have made a difference in the outcome of this election on a deceased animal.