Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that the election was held on Tuesday and that Donald Trump is now the president-elect. If you actually look at the numbers, Hillary Clinton got more votes, but the Electoral College prevented her from winning the election.

The candidates were only about 200,000 votes apart in numbers, according to CNN. This does not seem like a huge number, and if everybody voted and didn’t essentially throw away their vote, the numbers may not have been as close as they were.

If you didn’t vote, especially in such a crucial election, you threw away your chance at helping make a difference. You may think that that your vote wouldn’t make a difference, but when millions of people think that way, those votes could have made a difference.

The election could have also gone a whole different way if people didn’t vote third party. I completely understand wanting to protest your vote, but again, in an election this crucial and this close in votes, your vote would have made a huge difference. And, voting third party has usually never had a good chance of winning. The majority of people will either vote Democratic or Republican, so a third party candidate rarely has a chance of actually winning the majority of votes.

This difference would have meant Clinton would have won Florida, which would have given her a better chance at winning the election.

Tweets were also going around online about thousands of people who wrote in Harambe for president, which Snopes debunked. But, people still tweeted pictures of their ballot where they actually voted for a dead gorilla. Why would you decide it was a good idea to write that in? You voted would be voided and you had no say in the matter.

Devout Bernie Sanders supporters also vowed to write in his name because he was not elected as the Democratic candidate. He was not a legal write-in, so putting his name on the ballot also voided your vote and costs votes for both sides.

For the next four years, if you did not vote, you cannot complain about who the president is. You had the chance to make a difference and decided to sit it out. Same goes for voting third party. Your votes could have made a difference on a lot of different issues, including women’s rights, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights.

If you don’t like the way things turn out, and you didn’t participate, you have no room to complain.

As Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote in “Hamilton,” “Do not throw away your shot.”