My vote is important to me. It is one of the few ways that I can make my wishes known on public policy in a manner that requires elected officials to listen to me.

My right to vote cannot be revoked by any elected official unless I give up my U.S. citizenship or they convict me of a felony. I am too old to be drafted into military service and too outspoken to be a U.S. government employee.

My vote cannot be stolen by any private citizen or organization unless they send an impostor to the place where I vote or unless they tamper with the electronic machines that record my vote, both of which are Federal crimes.

My vote is only one among an electorate whose potential members are counted in the hundreds of millions. Even the active members of this group, the people who can be counted on to vote in every presidential election, are counted in the tens of millions, but in every election, there is always one local congressional district, sometimes one statewide race, that is won or lost by a few individual votes, so my vote can be as important to other people as it is to me.

I am a voter who cares about the sanctity of my Constitution, the economic and military security of my country, and the future of my party, the Republican Party, which demonstrated a commitment to civil rights exactly one hundred years ago by electing the first woman in Congress. The elected representatives of my party, including women, renewed their commitment to civil rights by voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in higher numbers than the Democrats. A Republican president whom I admire for many reasons, Ronald Reagan, put the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. The biggest supporters of my party include the veterans who protect the country I love, the small business owners who hire a large percentage of the Americans I love, and the farmers who feed the world with their crops and their taxes.

Since my vote belongs to me, in a country whose Constitution explicitly gives me the right to express my thoughts, it is my right to say that I cannot and will not vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

I cannot and will not vote for Hillary because I believe that she embodies decades of corruption. I believe she committed negligent homicide of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in September 2012 at Benghazi. I believe she committed a federal felony by using a private server for secret State Department communications. There is a reputable report that a foreign hacker accessed it. I believe that she committed another federal felony by deleting e-mails from her private server, a process similar to Richard Nixon’s decision to erase tape recordings of White House conversations. That decision was one of the reasons for his third impeachment article.

My reasons for refusing to vote for Donald Trump are different. I have not seen evidence of his participation in any public policy, so I cannot and will not blame him for that, but I have many objections to him as a presidential candidate. Because I care about the right to life, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, I am offended that he has said that his pro-abortion sister, who is a federal judge, would be an excellent candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. Because I care about my country, I am offended at his vocal support for Obama, expressed in a tweet he wrote on the night of Obama’s 2012 re-election. I have also seen a photo of Donald with his wife Melania, standing next to Bill and Hillary Clinton. In this photo, Donald is standing next to Hillary, and they are both smiling.

I am also offended at the way that Donald treated other Republican presidential candidates. Instead of showing the sportsmanship that is a welcome characteristic of my party, he insulted every person whom he considered to be a threat to his candidacy. To this day, I still cannot understand how he expects to receive the votes of their supporters.

In my personal opinion, Hillary Clinton is an enemy of my country, but the enemy of my enemy (Donald Trump) is not always my friend. The enemy of Western Europe in the 1940s was Nazi Germany, but Russia, which had a Marxist government and a communist economy since 1917, was not their friend.

I cannot and will not vote for Hillary or Donald, but for me, there is an alternative. I really like U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, for many reasons, and I voted for him during my primary election in March.

The Republican convention is still more than a month from now, but I have already made a public commitment to this man, because, in my mind, he has already made a commitment to the values that I hold.  If he doesn’t become the Republican nominee in July, I will exercise my legal and moral right to write his name onto my voting ballot in November.

May God continue to bless the United States of America, one of the few places left in the world where political choices are still available to an ordinary citizen.

David A. Cain has been a blogger since June 2012. This is a clickable list of his 20 most well-read blog pages.