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TLDR: I'm not voting for Hillary - I'm voting for Jill. But please read all of this if you have the time. You'll find it enlightening. Believe me. First, I'm back after another extended absence. Now, onto the question of who I am voting for, and why. Initially, I was going to vote for Bernie Sanders. I even went to the length of volunteering for his campaign in Colorado for much of 2015 and part of 2016. And then, primary season began. And guys, let me tell you...I have stories. Things started off great for us volunteers - we spent all of last fall going from door to door, making phone call after phone call, organizing dozens of rallies in support of Bernie and like-minded candidates for the house, the senate, the state legislature, city government, county government...we fought our asses off. Many of our weekends were consumed alone from the thousands of doors we knocked on, and we didn't even let the weather hold us back - we had people out walking through even blinding snow to canvass for Bernie's campaign. And then, something happened. Back in December and January, in anticipation of the primaries, many of our volunteers from all over the state began to travel out to help out Iowa, California, Texas and much of the rest of the country. At that time, I was serving as a training captain with the campaign...I was in charge of getting new volunteers trained on how to conduct phone banking, how to canvass, how to get voters educated on what they needed to do to change their registration ahead of the primaries and the caucuses. Because of my position within the campaign, I was able to call into and participate in not only a lot of nightly phone meetings with our state volunteers, but also other campaign volunteers and leaders from all 50 states. And what I saw and heard behind the scenes still has me very unsettled about how our democracy works, or rather how we think it should work. We did manage to get millions of people added to the Democratic Party voter lists who supported Bernie, and they kept track of this through Mini-VAN (an app used to bring up registered Democratic voter's contact information - all of which is given to us voluntarily by people who are registered as Democrats) and a lot of meticulous documentation done at least twice a week as the canvassers and phone bankers continued to work. And at the end of it, Bernie actually had far, far more support as a presidential candidate than Hillary could ever dream of. And then, the primaries hit. You all saw it unfold. Hillary "won" 34 states and Bernie won 23. The problem is, she shouldn't have taken that many. In each state Hillary took, our meetings right after the win was called for Hillary were chaotic. We fielded god knows how many millions of emails, of Facebook notices, phone calls, tweets from people we helped to get register ahead of each state's deadline to change your party affiliation to vote in the Democratic Party primaries or participate in caucus if that's what your state did. Most of those messages we received from Bernie supporters we canvassed for and called directly all followed a similar theme: their party affiliation was changed to Republican, independent, Green Party or some other party without explanation. And the way a lot of states structured everything, changing your party affiliation on the same day was not allowed in almost all of the country. There were other problems, too. Our own volunteers on the ground, many of whom volunteered to run caucus locations (I trained a good number of them myself) and polling sites reported seeing Clinton volunteers on site, many of whom were already in positions of responsibility. From there, things got worse. We were all direct witnesses to a lot of the behind the scenes clashes with Clinton volunteers who elected to close a lot of polling stations hours before they were due to be closed. Thanks to the party changes made to many Bernie supporters we had listed within Mini-VAN (this app is available to any volunteer who is doing canvassing and phone banking with the Democratic Party and can easily be accessed just by using a personal account you set up as a volunteer), provisional ballots were almost always the rule of the day, and on those nightly conference calls, we had people openly attesting to witnessing Clinton's people throwing out provisional ballots at the end of the night. At caucuses all around the country where Clinton's people were predominantly present in leadership positions (many of them holdovers from the 2012 elections - caucus is a complex topic to navigate and I had to attend four training sessions just to get completely trained on what to expect and what to do at one), our people with the campaign not only caught Clinton supporters in charge of caucus locations openly ignoring votes for Bernie (and in many instances even for O'Malley before he dropped out), but pressing onto other minor issues on their agenda that was not discussed with our own campaign volunteers who stepped up to help out with running a caucus as leaders without so much as a roll call vote - it was a rushed process, and we had endless reports of these antics happening in almost every state that utilized caucusing as a way to nominate a candidate for President. And the rabbit hole continues. With the states that used primaries to determine a nominee's delegates, as I noted before, we were witness to ballots being thrown out, polling stations being closed early in the day by people we identified as Clinton campaign volunteers from having run into them out in the field, no accommodations made at all for disabled voters...on top of those issues, I heard volunteer leaders from almost every state where Clinton "won" state that there were even limited amounts of ballots available at a huge amount of primary locations nationwide. The worse of these happened in Arizona - one fellow training captain I met while briefly in Utah earlier this spring mentioned how some of Clinton's people at a polling station in Tucson were openly joking about how with so few ballots, the "communists" supporting Bernie will simply turn away and they could just finish up and elect Clinton. He and several others with his local office attempted to take this up with Arizona's secretary of state, only to get brushed off, and outside of maybe two independent newspapers with little reach (his own words), no other media outlets he contacted showed any interest in investigating this issue. And the rabbit hole goes deeper. When it came to our county convention and state convention in Colorado, things got worse. One of the few people running for office here, a person who would nominally be called a "Berniecrat", declared her intention to run for Doug Lamborn's seat in the House of Representatives. The head of the county Democratic Party walked up to her and told her there was no need - they already had someone they were going to run for office. As we found out later at our state convention, the head of the county Democratic Party was planning to have Irv Halter, a local conservative Democrat best known for having been a major general in the Air Force, for at least the third time in a row. They ended up tapping another conservative leaning Democrat to try and go for Lamborn's seat, but thanks to our work in getting out word in the area about Misty, she ended up winning the primary back in June - it was enough to generate headlines nationwide and even worldwide. The same story went for the county commission - another candidate, Electra, announced at county convention her intention to run for district 3 commissioner. Again, same thing from the head of the county Democratic Party - they were planning on tapping someone else of their own choosing. And at both county and state, we had elected officials who we knew to be Hillary supporters actually telling a lot of people from the Bernie campaign that our votes didn't matter at all. And we continued to hear this on the conference calls we had with other volunteers at Bernie's campaign offices all over the country - that Hillary's supporters at a huge amount of county and state Democratic conventions were openly disparaging us and were not even counting any Bernie votes, but instead holding a vote for Hillary to be the nominee before closing out the voice votes. And still, the rabbit hole doesn't end there. Now, we're sitting here just over two weeks after the end of the Democratic National Convention. The conference calls I was a part of to discuss strategies we could take or even other options are no longer happening - we all saw Bernie get up and endorse the neo-liberal disaster (to quote Dr. Cornel West) that is Hillary Clinton at the convention. I know of several hundred people who went to the convention as Bernie delegates, and the national convention in Philadelphia was simply a repeat of what we saw at the county level and at the state level. There, the DNC at the last minute decided to change the time of the roll call vote for delegates without advance warning. Again, there were a lot of reports of elected Democratic officials supporting Hillary telling our people that our votes didn't count or even matter. There, a lot of votes for Bernie not being counted. And true to form, the exact thing we fought hard to ensure would never happen, did happen - Hillary is the nominee. The email leak from WikiLeaks just validated everything I heard on those conference calls while as training captain. It validated every suspicious incident we tried to have investigated but were rebuffed by the DNC on. It validated the antics Debbie Wasserman Schultz engaged in against our campaign volunteers in Florida. The maddening thing is that although all of us know Hillary herself had a hand in manipulating this election to her benefit, she left it up to her surrogates all over the country to do it for her. None of us doubt she was directly involved in face to face meetings with her own campaign volunteers in each state she went through, and none of us doubt those same volunteers for her campaign spread out across the country to stop the one actual honest person who was listening to the needs of the entire country through deception and fraud. And now, having seen up close how the political process worked in this election, and having gained an idea of how unlikeable Democrats like Hillary end up as the front runner despite what the rest of the nation actually wants out of a leader, I'm not voting for her. Her policies alone are deeply distasteful to me, and only serve to continue to enrich the rich, even if it will continue to be detrimental to the working class in this country, detrimental to the cause of peace, and especially detrimental to the long-term well being of the environment. We were fucked over...and I'm saying that in my former capacity from within Bernie's campaign. We were fucked over by someone with no respect for the actual workings of democracy, and the idea that we should forget about her campaign's manipulation of this election, her campaign's torrents of verbal abuse towards us Bernie supporters and volunteers, her continued support of corporate interests, her conservative hawkish views on foreign policy...we're supposed to forget that, and come together because she "wants what I want"...damn the fact that she has whored herself out to corporate assholes for years at our expense...and has never done any serious fighting for the very people that her and her husband's policies have continued to harm. We're supposed to do all of that to defeat Trump, and are told that a vote for anyone else but her is a default vote for Trump, damn the actual reality that a vote for a candidate of your choosing is a vote for that person alone, and no one else. I'm taking my chances this round, and supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party - she was my plan B all along, and I have known of her and been an admirer of her for 3 years now. It's a long shot, but I'm choosing to make my own stand as a progressive and not compromising because of yet another manufactured bad guy that the Democratic Party's watered down corporate friendly policies have helped to create. And given everything I just saw unfold from the inside of Bernie's campaign? It's a choice I make with pride. And I know I won't go against my own morals and ethics by voting, yet again, for the "lesser of two evils".