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As the presidential race began slipping away from Hillary Clinton on 8 November 2016, many people took to Twitter to blame third party candidates (such as the Green Party's Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson) for siphoning away votes from the Democratic candidate — with such complaints including the claim that thousands of voters had cast write-in protest votes for Harambe, the gorilla controversially killed at the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 after a child fell into his pen: The Daily Snark, an entertainment web site that publishes satirical material, added some misplaced credibility to this claim when they published an article repeating it: It's possible that some voters actually did write in Harambe's name, as many people tweeted to assert they did: However, the claim that the gorilla received 15,000 votes (or any other specific number) is not yet backed up by any actual data. On 8 November 2016, the general election votes were still being counted, and a running vote tally was not available for write-in candidates. In fact, any write-in votes for Harambe would most likely have been counted as unofficial votes and not tallied separately in the majority of states, which require write-in candidates to fill out paperwork before the election to ensure their votes are counted separately: We don't know how many people voted for Harambe during the presidential election. But anyone claiming that 15,000 (or any other number of) people voted for the deceased gorilla is repeating a false claim.
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