Hi Members of the Electoral College,

We don’t know each other. Probably. I mean, if we did, it would be quite a coincidence, so let’s just go with we don’t know each other. We likely live in very different parts of the country. Where I am buildings rise high next to a lake so large you’d swear it was a sea, a goaty curse was broken, and I hear people like our pizza.

That’s my America.

Different colors and shapes of faces when I walk to the grocery store; the warmth being sucked out of the air as December goes on while a wind with teeth bites your face; the heaviest coat in the coat wardrobe making its seasonal debut.

That’s my America.

I’ve visited some of your America, too. The otherworldly loveliness of the Florida Keys; the quiet, rolling beauty of Wisconsin; the unexpected hills of southern Indiana; Louisville’s spanning bridges; the sudden mountains of Pennsylvania; the open skies of Iowa; the long, straight roads of Ohio that have their own kind of silence.

That’s your America.

I’ve driven and I’ve flown, and I’ve never felt like a stranger in this country. I’ve chatted with servers and people in the line at the supermarket; hotel guests in an elevator and the clerks at the front desks. I’ve held the door for you and you for me, and perhaps we shared a smile or a nod.

That’s your America.

And the one thing I’ve never questioned, even if I knew that your secret inside color was as red as my secret inside color is blue, is that we are all still colors of the flag. Red next to blue; blue next to red; we are America.

This is our America.

We cannot permit this country that we love, this country that is made of all those moments of driving through and staying and visiting and moving and living and families and acknowledging the thing that makes us all the same, we cannot permit it to be lost to a foreign power with plans of its own.

This is our America.

I understand that secret red inside you, Moral Electors, is a strong force. It is a defining force. And it might make the decision you must make feel difficult. We understand, we really do.

But now is not the time for our blue and red to stand, separated. Now is the time for us all to be the colors of our flag, to rescue our nation from the precipice, to tell a foreign power that there is no room for interference between those swathes of red and blue, blue and red.

History will remember you, Moral Electors, for your service to your country when you reject Russia’s candidate, when you reject Vladimir Putin’s candidate.

When you think about me in my corner of our country while I think about you in your corner of our country (probably with jealousy if it’s a warm corner of our country). History will remember you when you stand with the popular vote, stand with the person that Russia fears so deeply, so completely, that Putin would go to this length to stop her. History will remember you, Moral Electors, when you reject Donald Trump and cast your votes for Secretary Hillary Clinton.

United we stand, red with blue, blue with red, and simply tell Russia “no.”

This is our America.

[This piece originally appeared on Medium]