In the early hours of Nov. 9, Donald Trump was elected as the next President of the United States. Almost immediately, protests formed across the country in cities like New York, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, according to the Associated Press.

But conservatives were quick to denounce the protests. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News claimed that “left-wing protesters do not respect an honest election” on his show the O’Reilly Factor.  even comparing the protests to those of the communist uprisings in Cuba and Soviet Russia. Trump himself, via Twitter, called the demonstrators “professional protesters, incited by the media” and rebuked their actions as “very unfair!”

Despite what many conservatives believe, these “Anti-Trump” protests aren’t ridiculous, unfair or pointless. The simple fact is that the Electoral College, although put into place by our founding fathers for good reason, is a broken system that has failed the majority.

The country did not choose Trump. In fact, according to CNN, Hillary Clinton was, as of Dec. 8, leading the popular vote by over 2.6 million votes, a number that is expected to grow. To put that in perspective, the popular vote margin of the ever-controversial 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was a mere 539 thousand.

The Electoral College not only failed the people, but it failed its intended purpose. In Federalist Paper Number 68, Alexander Hamilton puts forth that “the process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Donald Trump, an accused sex offender with no political experience, fails to fulfill the founding fathers’ design of the President of the United States. Thankfully, those same founding fathers granted all of us the right to protest the government in the First Amendment.

It’s clear to anyone paying attention to the anti-Trump protesters aren’t sore losers and their message isn’t ridiculous. They’ve been failed by a system that has never failed so catastrophically. They’re people of color, people of the LGBT community, immigrants, Muslims, women, men, Americans. They’re people who have had eight years of unprecedented acceptance and progress – progress that, if he holds true to his campaign promises, Donald Trump will undo.

To exercise the rights that the First Amendment granted all of us in the face of a terrifying and dangerous future in Trump’s America is not ridiculous or useless – it’s essential.