Welcome to another deep dive. We're really thrilled
to have you joining us today. Yeah, thanks so
much for being here. You know, our mission on
this show is usually to take a... Massive complicated
concept and kind of break it down into something
digestible for you right something manageable
exactly Yeah, but today we're actually flipping
the script. We are we're gonna take a seemingly
mundane everyday object I mean something you've
probably stuck to your jacket or Your dashboard
at some point without a second thought and we
are going to reveal the incredibly deep historical
roots, the wild community dynamics, and the profoundly
intense rituals hidden right there behind its
sticky backing. It's just the perfect example
of how an ordinary item can carry, you know,
extraordinary cultural weight. It really is.
To unpack this, we're drawing from a really comprehensive
Wikipedia article. It meticulously traces the
history, the design evolution, and the surprising
psychological significance of the I voted sticker
in the United States. It's an object so ubiquitous
that it essentially becomes invisible to us.
But when you apply an academic lens to its history,
you realize it is anything but ordinary. And
I really want to hook you right out of the gate
here, listener. Yeah. Because we aren't just
going to talk about a boring piece of office
stationery. No, definitely not. By the end of
this deep dive, you're going to understand how
this simple one inch piece of paper has spawned
intense community design battles involving monstrous
graffiti covered spider skulls. Which is still
my favorite part of this whole thing. Oh, it's
so good. And you're going to learn how this tiny
sticker actually required historic marble monuments
to be covered in heavy duty plastic shields.
Just to survive election day. Right. Just to
survive. And perhaps most relevant to your daily
routine, we're going to explore how it became
the undisputed, uncontested king. of Election
Day social media. The absolute king. We are talking
about the fascinating history and the hidden
rituals of the I Voted sticker. What we are really
looking at here is the mechanism of how a society
takes a solitary bureaucratic process. Standing
in a booth and filling out a ballot. Exactly,
and transforms it into a shared cultural event.
The sticker acts as the bridge between the private
act of voting and the public declaration of civic
duty. It's a physical bridge. And the source
material lays out that evolution beautifully,
starting long before the invention of the adhesive
sticker itself. Which brings us to our first
major era. the pre -sticker era. This spans roughly
from the 1920s through the 1970s. Because the
I voted sticker, it didn't actually start as
a sticker at all. Not at all. It evolved from
a much broader, much older tradition of election
day memorabilia. We're talking about metal buttons,
lapel pins, even specialized clothing. Yeah,
wearable items. I was looking through the notes
on the National Museum of American History's
collection, and they've pinpointed the earliest
item that serves as a direct predecessor to the
modern sticker. Could you walk us through what
that object is? Yeah, absolutely. The Smithsonian's
earliest artifact in this specific lineage is
a metal election day button from the year 1920.
Wow, 1920. It was distributed by the Republican
Party in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the physical
nature of this object is so important. How so?
While this wasn't a cheap disposable paper handout,
it was a stamped metal pin, something with permanence
and weight designed to be physically fastened
to your clothing. OK, let's unpack this. I want
you. the listener to try and imagine the sheer
emotional weight of holding that 1920 button.
Yeah. Or better yet, imagine the feeling of actually
pinning that metal to your lapel over a century
ago. The text on this specific button reads,
under the 19th amendment, I cast my first vote,
November 2nd, 1920. It gives you chills. It really
does. Just think about what that text represents.
This wasn't some friendly little neighborhood
reminder to go hit the polls. It was a physical,
wearable declaration of a newly won constitutional
right. What's fascinating here is how the timeline
of the surviving memorabilia perfectly aligns
with the broader picture of American enfranchisement.
Meaning who gets to vote. Right. When you look
at the historical record, you don't see a steady,
even production of these items year after year.
It's not a flat line. No. Instead, you see Massive
explosions of voting memorabilia that correlate
directly with major expansions of voting rights.
Oh, that makes so much sense. The 1920 Lancaster
Button, of course, commemorates the culmination
of the women's suffrage movement. For the women
wearing that pin, it was the ultimate badge of
enfranchisement. Tangible proof of a hard -fought
victory. Exactly. It fundamentally changes how
you view a piece of campaign swag. It transforms
it from a marketing tool into, like, a personal
victory medal. That's a great way to put it.
And the source notes that this pattern repeats
itself. There was another massive flourishing
of voting -themed clothing and paraphernalia
decades later. Yes, specifically following the
passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971. And for
those following along, the 26th Amendment is
what lowered the voting age from 21 down to 18.
A shift that instantly brought a massive influx
of young, newly enfranchised voters into the
electorate. A huge demographic shift. Right.
You have a demographic, young adults in the early
1970s, that is traditionally very engaged in
self -expression, political activism, and visible
counterculture. Totally. When they suddenly gain
access to the ballot box, they are going to integrate
that participation into their visual identity.
They're going to sew it into their denim jackets,
pin it to their bags, wear it on their shirts.
It really highlights the underlying psychology
of wearable civic pride. I mean, why do we feel
this deep -seated need to broadcast our participation
in what is essentially a secret ballot? It's
a paradox, isn't it? It is. The whole point of
the American voting system is that no one knows
who you voted for or even if you voted at all,
yet we have this intense desire to prove that
we were there. The secrecy of the ballot is exactly
why the physical token is so necessary. The vote
itself is invisible. You go into a private booth,
you make your choice behind a curtain and you
leave. There is no public fanfare in the moment
of action. It's just you and the paper. So the
button or the clothing or eventually the sticker,
it acts as a visual receipt. It is tangible proof
to your community that you hold power in the
democratic system and that you actively exercised
it. It is a way of reclaiming the public nature
of democracy without compromising the privacy
of your specific choices. A visual receipt. That
is the perfect way to phrase it. It's the difference
between buying a carton of milk and finishing
a marathon. One is just a transaction, but the
other is a mark of identity that you want to
share. Exactly. And it's worth noting that the
transition from these permanent metal pins to
disposable paper wasn't instantaneous. No, it
took some time. The source mentions a 1950 article
from the Miami Herald that explicitly references
an I have voted sticker. So the concept of a
temporary badge was starting to percolate in
the mid -century. The shift from metal to paper
is largely a story of scale and economics. As
most things are. Right. As the electorate grew
and as the desire to provide these tokens universally
to every single voter took hold, metal buttons
just became cost prohibitive for local municipalities.
You can't hand out millions of metal pins every
couple of years. Exactly. Paper and adhesive
offered a way to democratize the receipt itself.
Everyone gets one, regardless of party affiliation
or budget. Which really makes you appreciate
the fact that the Smithsonian and other institutions
continue to meticulously collect these materials
today. They absolutely do. They aren't just archiving
the official paper ballots or the mechanical
voting machines. They're actively collecting
the ephemeral campaign swag. The buttons, the
pins, the temporary stickers. They treat these
items as crucial historical artifacts. Because
they capture the emotional resonance of the electorate
in a way that official government documents simply
cannot. That's so true. A tally sheet from 1920
shows you how many people voted and who won the
election. But a scratched metal button that says,
under the 19th amendment, I cast my first vote,
shows you how the fabric of society was permanently
altered and how the people living through it
actually felt. That sets the stage beautifully
for the era where this concept goes from being
occasional memorabilia to an absolute nationwide
phenomenon. The boom. Let's move into the 1980s.
This is the boom. This is the birth of the modern
icon you and I know today, right? According to
the Wikipedia article the 1980 saw a massive
almost sudden rise in the popularity of the I
voted sticker. Yeah, and interestingly It wasn't
driven by some federal mandate or top down government
decree. No, not at all. It was driven by multiple
independent entities just deciding this was something
people wanted. It was an entirely decentralized
grassroots boom driven by local civic organizations
and private businesses. Who were the early players?
For example, a realtors association in Phoenix,
Arizona began printing their own I voted stickers
in 1985 to hand out to people. Just on their
own. Just on their own. Then a company called
National Campaign Supply, based down in Florida,
claims to have started selling them commercially
a year later in 1986. So you have these different
groups recognizing the psychological value of
the visual receipt we were just talking about.
But 1987 is really the watershed year here. This
is the year that Independent Tabulation Corp,
a company in Mooresville, North Carolina, which
is now known as Intab, introduces the iconic
design. The design. We're talking about the design
created by the company's president, Janet Boudreau.
I want to talk about the physical design of this
because I guarantee you, the listener, have worn
this exact sticker. What are the specific design
elements that Boudreaux put together? The specifications
are incredibly precise and they've really become
the industry standard. Okay. It is a white oval
measuring exactly one and three -quarter inches
wide by seven -eighths of an inch tall. Very
specific. Very. On the left side of the oval
there is a stylized image of a waving American
flag and to the right of the flag rendered in
a very crisp blue serif font are the words, I
voted. It is so clean and instantly recognizable.
But the source material points out that Boudreaux's
design was actually a massive departure from
what other people were doing at the time. What
did stickers look like before 1987? Before Boudreaux's
design, stickers often featured very literal
bureaucratic graphics. What does that mean exactly?
You would see images of little check boxes or
dry illustrations of a paper ballot dropping
into a wooden box. Oh, wow. They were functional,
but they were entirely focused on the mechanics
of the task. Literally just a picture of the
chore you just completed. Pretty much. Like wearing
a sticker of a broom after sweeping the kitchen
floor. I checked a box today. That is a great
analogy. And from a graphic design perspective,
Boudreau's pivot is profound. She moved away
from literal depictions of the voting mechanics
and embraced emotional patriotic symbolism. The
flag. The waving flag isn't about the action
of marking a piece of paper. It's about the feeling
of American participation. That's a huge distinction.
It is. And choosing a serif font, which traditionally
conveys authority, history, and institutional
trust, anchors the emotion with a sense of gravity.
It elevated the act. It tapped into a shared
national identity rather than a bureaucratic
process. Exactly. It is just mind blowing to
me that a design from 1987 created by a single
company president in North Carolina became the
ubiquitous national standard. It really is wild.
Think about that exact oval, that specific blue
font, that exact rendering of the flag. Intedict
still produces and sells this exact design today.
right now. Still going strong. We are talking
about nearly 40 years of absolute design dominance
for a tiny piece of adhesive paper. It speaks
to the power of a perfectly executed symbol.
When a design successfully captures the core
emotional truth of an experience, in this case,
that profound sense of civic duty and belonging,
it doesn't need to be constantly updated or modernized.
Just works. It transcends its bearer and becomes
a standardized icon of the American democratic
process. But of course, Americans love their
independence. They do. And while the national
NTAB Oval is the gold standard, state and local
governments are actually the ones who manage
elections in the United States. Right, it's very
decentralized. There is no single federal election
board running the polling places. It's handled
county by county, state by state. They're the
ones who purchase these generic stickers from
suppliers. And somewhere along the line, many
of these local governments decided, you know
what, we want to design our own. Which brings
us to the incredible art of civic duty, the local
flavor and the absolutely wild viral contests
of the modern era. This is a fascinating evolution
because we see the sticker transition from a
standardized national symbol back into a reflection
of highly specific local pride. Moving away from
the generic oval. Exactly. Local election officials
began to realize that custom stickers could be
a unique point of connection with their constituents.
It's a way of saying, your vote matters here
in this specific community. The Wikipedia article
lists some fantastic examples of this local pride.
In New York City, their stickers have historically
featured the Statue of Liberty. Classic. Down
in Georgia, as you might expect, the designs
often feature a peach. Makes perfect sense. And
in Travis County, Texas, they use a design depicting
a blue bonnet, which is the Texas State flower,
and they actually shape the stem of the flower
itself into a check mark. I love that one. It
is such a clever, elegant way to merge regional
identity with the act of voting. And this localization
goes far beyond just visual landmarks or spate
symbols. It extends to deep inclusivity and accessibility.
Oh, definitely. A perfect example of this is
the Alaska Division of Elections. They recognize
that their electorate is incredibly diverse,
spread across vast geographies, and they reflect
that in their memorabilia. I read in the source
notes that Alaska prints their stickers in a
ton of different languages. Could you run through
that list? because I think it's staggering. Yeah,
they print I voted stickers with text in 10 different
languages to serve their population. Ten. Ten.
The list includes English, Spanish, Koyukon,
Gwich 'in. Aleut, Tagalog, Aleutique, Northern
Upeak, Nunavak Kupig and Yupik. When you hear
that list, Koyukon, Gwich and Yupik, you are
really struck by the sheer vastness of Alaska
and the incredible linguistic diversity required
just to make elections accessible and representative
of the people who actually live there. It's a
huge undertaking. It serves as a powerful reminder
that the American voter is not a monolith. The
experience of voting in an indigenous community
in rural Alaska is vastly different from voting
in Manhattan, and the stickers reflect that reality.
It's a beautiful reflection of the electorate.
But alongside these official government designed
local stickers, we've also seen a massive rise
in community design contests, particularly since
the 2010s. This is where it gets really fun.
It really does. The Election Assistance Commission
or the EAC, which is an independent federal agency
that helps coordinate and support local election
officials, has heavily promoted these sticker
design contests. They've gamified it a bit. They
have. They even feature a specific category for
creative and original I voted stickers. in their
annual Clearinghouse Awards, or Cleary Awards,
which they've been running since 2019. Here's
where it gets really interesting, because when
you open up the design process to the general
public, and specifically to grade school and
middle school students, you get results that
are wonderfully chaotic. Very chaotic. Forget
the dignified Statue of Liberty. Forget the elegant
Texas Blue Bonnet. Let's talk about Ulster County,
New York in the year 2022. The infamous 2022
contest. They held a design contest and a 14
year old artist named Hudson Rowan submitted
a design. I want to get the description exactly
right. You have to. The source material quotes
a piece from The Guardian to describe this art.
It says it is a skull -like head with bloodshot
eyes and multicolored teeth sitting atop turquoise
spider legs. It's quite an image. And the words
I voted are scribbled across it in a frantic,
almost unhinged graffiti -like font. It is a
wildly abstract, almost monstrous departure from
traditional themes of patriotism. To say the
least. There are no waving flags, no bald eagles,
no serene state flowers, just a bloodshot spider
skull. And it went completely viral. It won the
contest and a landslide. People loved it. Can
you imagine walking out of your polling place,
feeling that solemn historical weight of civic
duty and the poll worker smiles and hands you
a sticker of a screaming multicolored spider
skull to put on your jacket? It's such a great
contrast. I find it absolutely hilarious and
strangely beautiful. But from an academic perspective.
Why do election commissions lean into this? Why
encourage a spider skull over a traditional flag?
If we connect this to the bigger picture, the
EAC encourages these contests because they are
an incredibly potent tool for community engagement.
How so? Think about the mechanics of a youth
design contest. When you invite the public to
participate, and especially when you invite a
14 year old middle school student to design the
official sticker, you are accomplishing something
crucial. You're getting them involved early.
Yes. You are getting the next generation deeply
invested in the electoral process years before
they are legally allowed to cast a ballot. You
are demystifying the whole process. You're making
elections fun and relevant to a teenager. Precisely.
A 14 -year -old cannot legally vote for a mayor
or a president, but Hudson Rowan certainly participated
in the 2022 election in a highly visible, highly
impactful way. He left his mark. And everyone
in Oster County who voted for his design in the
contest or who proudly wore that spider skull
on Election Day felt a localized sense of ownership
over the process. They were part of the inside
joke. Right. It takes the dry bureaucracy of
voting and turns it into a community art project.
It builds civic habits early. It really makes
you wonder, what does your local sticker look
like? Yeah. What's yours? If you're listening
to this, next time you go to the polls, really
look at the sticker they hand you. Does it represent
your specific region? Is it a local landmark
designed by a high school student? Or are you
getting the classic 1987 Intob waving flag oval?
You're all valid. Whatever it is, it's the result
of a very specific choice made by your local
election officials to try and connect with you
on a community level. And that connection doesn't
end the moment the sticker is placed on a lapel.
No, it doesn't. The source material takes us
into an entirely different realm next. Which
brings us to the final and perhaps most profound
section of our deep dive. The modern ritual surrounding
the I voted sticker. This is where things get
really deep. Because this tiny adhesive badge
has transcended its original purpose of simply
proving that you voted, it has become the centerpiece
of incredibly complex social and even quasi religious
rituals. The word ritual is not an exaggeration
here. Let's talk about the Susan B. Anthony grave
ritual. This is a remarkable phenomenon. The
Wikipedia article references a 2020 paper by
a religious studies scholar named Jordan Conley,
who extensively analyzed this phenomenon. In
Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, lie
the gravestones of Susan B. Anthony and Mary
Stafford Anthony. Over the years, a practice
developed where voters would visit the cemetery
on election day and physically place their I
voted stickers directly onto Susan B. Anthony's
marble headstone. It's a striking visual phenomenon,
and Connolly's academic analysis of this practice,
specifically looking at the 2016 presidential
election and the 2018 midterms, is fascinating.
What was her main takeaway? She argues that these
stickers are functioning as a modern form of
a vote of offering. A vote of offering. For those
of us who might not be familiar with religious
studies terminology, could you break down what
a vote of offering actually is in modern terms
before we get into the historical comparisons?
Yeah, of course. At its most basic level, a vote
of offering is an object left in a sacred space
for religious or spiritual purposes. In modern
times, you might think of lighting a candle in
a cathedral, leaving a small stone on a Jewish
grave, tossing a coin into a wishing well, or
even leaving flowers and teddy bears at the site
of a public tragedy. That paints a very clear
picture. It is a physical item that represents
a prayer, a wish, or a tribute. The object stands
in for the person who left it. Okay, that makes
perfect sense. So how does Connolly connect this
modern act of leaving a sticker on a grave to
historical religious practices? Connolly specifically
compares this graveside practice to the ancient
Greek traditions surrounding Asclepius, who was
the Greek god of medicine and healing. The healing
god. Right. At the ancient sanctuaries of Asclepius,
people who were sick or injured would leave votive
offerings. Often these offerings were small sculptures
depicting the specific body parts that were ailing
them. Like a physical representation of the paint.
Yes, a carved foot, a clay hand. Ponley points
out that these ancient offerings served a dual
purpose. On one hand, they were devotional, they
honored the god. But on the other hand, they
were a means of recognizing a specific affliction
and actively enacting an appeal for healing.
It's fascinating to look at this purely through
an academic lens. And we should note... Regardless
of where anyone sits on the political spectrum,
Conley's research points out that the 2016 election
felt uniquely stressful and divisive for voters
across the board. It was a very tense time. The
source material quotes her study as describing
the 2016 election season as painfully regressive
and irreparably divisive in so many ways. So
in that heightened emotional context, the sticker
evolved into a sort of coping mechanism for the
electorate. That is the core of her argument.
Because the election was perceived by many of
these visitors as uniquely traumatic for the
nations, the act of leaving the sticker took
on that dual purpose she identified in the ancient
Greek sanctuaries of Asclepius. The devotional
and the healing. Exactly. The sticker on the
grave was of course a devotional offering to
a pioneer of women's suffrage, thanking her for
the right to vote. But it also functioned as
a marker of affliction and a literal appeal for
healing and restoration for a divided nation.
This raises an important question about how we
assign value to everyday objects. It completely
recontextualizes what this one -inch sticker
is capable of meaning. It really does. We started
this deep dive talking about a little badge that
just says, hey, I did my civic chore today. Then
it became, I am proud to be a participant in
American democracy. And then it becomes something
else entirely. Right. Here, in the quiet context
of this cemetery in Rochester, the sticker transforms
into a prayer. It becomes a physical plea for
the health of the Republic. That is an incredibly
heavy emotional burden for a mass -produced piece
of paper to carry. It is a profound shift in
utility, and the scale of this ritual in 2016
was staggering. Give us the numbers. The source
notes that approximately 12 ,000 people visited
Anthony's grave on Election Day 2016. Think about
the logistics of that. 12 ,000 people traveling
to a cemetery, bringing their freshly acquired
stickers as offerings. I am just in awe of that
visual. Imagine 12 ,000 little waving flags and
local spider skulls completely covering a historic
grave. It completely blanketed the stone. In
fact, the practice grew so incredibly popular
and the sheer volume of adhesive was so overwhelming
that it actually began to physically damage the
porous marble headstone. The marble couldn't
take it. By October of 2020, the cemetery officials
actually had to install a clear plastic shield
over the headstone just to protect it from further
degradation. They had to intervene. They put
the shield up so that the monument would survive,
but they intentionally left it accessible so
that people could still participate in the ritual
by placing their stickers on the plastic instead
of the marble. The fact that architectural intervention
was required to accommodate the ritual speaks
volumes. It perfectly illustrates how a personal,
individual action placing your own single sticker
aggregates into a massive, undeniable collective
statement. The accumulation is the point. Exactly.
The sticker ceases to be an individual receipt
and becomes the building block of a collective
monument. And that aggregation brings us to the
most widespread modern ritual of all. the digital
ritual. Ah, yeah. Because for every person who
can physically travel to Rochester, New York,
there are millions more participating in a very
similar dynamic online. The Election Day selfie.
You have probably taken one. I know I've definitely
taken one. Most of us have. It's a staple of
modern voting. The source material highlights
a 2023 paper by social media researcher Chelsea
Budkowski, who analyzed the ritual qualities
of selfies on Election Day, specifically looking
back at the 2016 election cycle. She conducted
a massive content analysis of Election Day selfies
posted on Twitter using election -related hashtags.
What did her research uncover about how we use
these images? The methodology and the scale of
her research are really telling. She starred
with a massive data set of three million election
-related tweets. Three million? From that enormous
pool, she identified and analyzed a representative
sample of 2 ,000 selfies. And what she found
fundamentally challenged the idea of what an
election selfie is. What did she find? She discovered
that the eye voting sticker was not just an incidental
background detail in these photos. It formed
the core vital component of the image and its
ritual importance online. Get this statistic
listener. Out of those sampled selfies, over
80 % featured an I voted sticker. 80%. 80%. It
appeared more frequently than pictures of polling
place signs. It appeared more frequently than
pictures of actual ballots or voting machines.
And crucially, it appeared far more frequently
than any visual markers of specific party affiliation.
It was the focal point. The sticker is the undisputed
dominant visual of digital civic participation.
It really emphasizes the concept of social proof
in the digital age. In the physical world, wearing
the sticker on your lapel tells the people you
pass on the street or the cashier at the grocery
store that you participated in the system. It's
a localized signal. But in the digital realm,
the selfie amplifies that social proof exponentially.
It bridges the physical localized act of going
to a community center or a school gymnasium to
vote with our highly curated global digital identities.
It broadcasts it to everyone. It is the ultimate
badge of honor for the internet era, proving
to our entire extended network of friends, family,
and followers that we showed up and did our part.
So what does this all mean for us as voters?
We started this journey with a heavy metal pin
from 1920 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, worn proudly
by a woman who was voting for the very first
time under the 19th Amendment. Right. We watched
that concept transition to paper and explode
into a nationwide boom in the 1980s standardized
by a woman in North Carolina into an iconic one
inch waving flag. The Intab design. We saw that
national standard morph into a canvas for local
pride, ending up as a 14 year old's wildly viral
spider skull in upstate New York. A true masterpiece.
We witnessed. 12 ,000 of these little stickers
plastered over a pioneer's grave like ancient
Greek votive offerings requiring a plastic shield
to save the marble. And finally, we saw it absolutely
dominate our digital feeds, appearing in 80 %
of all election selfies. When you look at the
entire timeline, it becomes clear that the I
Voted sticker is so much more than office stationery.
It really is. It is the physical embodiment of
a deeply personal yet completely collective civic
ritual. It is the connective tissue of the American
electorate, adapting and evolving with every
generation to meet our psychological need to
be recognized as participants. in our own governance.
It proves that the human need for a tangible
connection to our democratic institutions is
as strong today as it was a century ago, which
actually leads me to a final provocative thought
to leave you with today. Okay, let's hear it.
As we were looking through the gallery notes
and the source material, there are a couple of
fascinating entries that point toward the future
of this ritual. There is a digital version of
the sticker distributed by California in 2020.
Right, for people voting from home. And there
is a specific absentee voting sticker mailed
out by Virginia in 2008. As the actual mechanics
of voting continue to evolve further and further
away from physical polling places and deeper
into mail -in ballots and digital realms, how
is our need for physical proof going to adapt?
That's a great question. If we are increasingly
voting in isolation from our kitchen tables or
our smartphones, the communal aspect of the polling
place disappears. Exactly. Will the act of covering
Susan B. Anthony's grave eventually come a purely
digital phenomenon, a virtual shrine in the metaverse?
Or is there something so fundamentally human
about our psychology, so deeply rooted in our
need for tactile reality, that we will always,
always crave that tiny one inch physical badge
of honor to stick on our shirt? to prove to the
physical world that we showed up. You might always
need that receipt. It is something for you to
mull over the next time you cast a ballot and
peel the backing off that little sticker. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive.
We will catch you next time.